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Libya a Year Later: poverty, division, death

A year after the invasion ofLibya: poverty, division and death

France was the country responsible for launching the first bomb on Libya and paving the way for a military invasion led by the the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) which had the precise goal of overthrowing the government of Muammar Gaddafi. On March 19, 2011, when the Security Council of the United Nations approved the development of a no-fly zone over the country in North Africa, it turned out to be a non-stop raid that lasted eight months, and yet today there is still no actual record of the consequences of what was produced in the population. However, in late February of last year, the U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, declared that her country did not discount any possibility in intervening in Libya. A few days later, the United States would lead the NATO intervention, calling for the “collaboration” of its allies France, Britain and Italy, among others, the difference from the previous invasions they led in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they sent in their military strength unilaterally. Before Gaddafi’s government was replaced by terrorist elements in October last year, from this action, they were responsible for 5,000 deaths due to bombing. However, for their part, reports on preliminary data by the UN recently gave an accounting for the deaths of only 60 civilians by air raids by the Atlantic alliance. According to the Venezuelan ambassador in Libya, Afif Tajeldine, the death toll could exceed 70,000, given that NATO has made more than 20,000 air raids and surpassed 8,000 armed attacks.

Interviewed by Radio del Sur, the diplomat, who now resides in Tunisia since the Venezuelan embassy was attacked by pro-colonialist groups that fought against Gaddafi, affirmed that the invasion was aimed at the conquest of oil for the United States. “Before the entry of NATO into Libya, 118 people died. After NATO came into Tripoli, they killed more than 70,000 people in the capital and its environs. They died the victims of U.S. weapons and no one reports it. There were no more than 118 who were killed in the conflict between Gaddafi’s government and military-terrorist groups. However, the 70,000 people killed by NATO are not in the reports of victims of the conflict,” denounced Tajeldine. The diplomat recalled the high level of human development that the country of Libya had, the second in quality of life in Africa and among the top ten worldwide. The North African country was the victim of a “sinister plan against the peace and development of the Libyan people, attacked militarily by the United States and Europe based on disinformation and a media war, which portrayed the Gaddafi as a dictator, murderer and antisocial. An effort at demonization,” he asserted. Before Gaddafi was reported “murdered” he had warned that the nation would end up like Afghanistan, within boundaries that Al Qaeda cells operated, and that the main goal was to divide the country geographically. On February 22, 2011, the Libyan leader expressed in a speech to the nation that “the U.S. wants to do to Libya the same as they did in Afghanistan and even in Iraq. They want Libya to become a torn country, and the United States will do the same as they did with the Afghans and Iraqis to our territories”.

Gaddafi added “if the Americans come, back will come colonialism, they are terrorists who want to convert Libya into a country that depends on them“. At present, Libya suffers from a deep internal conflict where armed gangs of the NTC are constantly fighting for power in the various regions. Journalistic investigations proved the presence of militants of Al Qaeda, a situation that the UN and even less the U.S. and NATO, were willing to admit. The process of division of Libya began weeks ago when tribal leaders and politicians declared the autonomy of Cyrenaica, an ancient region that was part of the three federations during the monarchy, overthrown in 1969 by the Green Revolution led by Gaddafi. “Now we see a divided Libya, where they send their terrorist military groups, aided by the United States, NATO and the governments of the Gulf. Now, each has its share of the booty. In Tripoli there are no fewer than twenty military groups and each does what they want, without law or justice. We divided Libya, but the plan is to fragment it further,” warned Tajeldine. On the internal situation on Libyan territory, the Venezuelan diplomat said that within the country “no one can go out on the streets after 7 pm and almost no salaries are being paid”. Tajeldine warned that Libya’s international reserves, which exceed 200 billion dollars, are “in the hands of imperialism, which has enjoyed the possession of this wealth”. {english.pravda.ru – Translated from the Portuguese version by: Lisa Karpova}

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FIGHTING ISLAMOPHOBIA – WHILE JEWS DIE

Fighting Islamophobia has become a cause célèbre among both the Jewish establishment and the Jewish farther-left. In the meantime, Jews are being murdered, tortured, attacked, plotted against and vilified in the name of Islam. In the course of his killing spree in the French city of Toulouse last week, Mohammed Merah caught an 8-year-old Jewish girl by the hair, looked into her eyes, and put a bullet in her brain. Merah videotaped the atrocity for the amusement of other jihadists. He also murdered a rabbi and his two young sons. French President Nicholas Sarkozy (who occasionally shows a glimmering of intelligence on the deconstruction of the French nation by immigration) insisted: “The Muslim faith has nothing to do with the insane acts of this man.” “Muslims like Jews; Jews like Muslims,” French Grand Rabbi Gilles Bernheim babbled. “I love you; you love me; we’re a happy family – even if I’m the descendant of apes and swine and you’re a holy warrior”. And Mohammed Moussaoui, president of CFCM, the largest French Muslim umbrella group, assured all and sundry that Merah’s actions were “the very negation of Islam” which “must not cause us to succumb to the panic of stigmatizing Muslims, which feeds Islamophobia.” The bodies of four Jews weren’t even cold and Moussaoui was fretting about Muslims being stigmatized. The Simon Wiesenthal Center put out a March 22 press release publicizing a poll demonstrating that “a third of Europeans show significant levels of anti-Semitism,” including the belief that Jews are a “money-hungry-power-seeking minority” – as if a killer drags an 8-year-old by her hair and shoots her in the head because he thinks Jews are greedy.

On March 14 in New York City, Rabbi Marc Schneier and Imam Shamsi Ali put on their “Combating Islamophobia” dog-and-pony show at the Upper West Side Jewish Community Center, moderated by none other than Chelsea Clinton. Displaying classic symptoms of Jewish guilt, the audience was lectured on (one-way) tolerance. Rabbi Schneier and his Imam Tonto were last heard from protesting Rep. Peter King’s very useful hearings on extremism among U.S. Muslims. Hear no evil, see no evil. Combating is not enough; we must also challenge. Further left, Jews Against Islamophobia is hosting a March 29th symposium, “Challenging Islamophobia” at the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew on Manhattan’s tony West End Avenue. “This will be an opportunity to learn about the issues they (the Muslim community) are addressing – such as police surveillance, detention, infringements on civil and human rights,” the group’s website discloses. Jews Against is trying to get New York Police Chief Ray Kelly fired for monitoring extremist groups, thus infringing their civil and human rights. Anti-Islamophobia fever is running high. Around the time of Rosh Hashanah in 2010, Rabbi David Saperstein, who runs Reform Judaism’s Religious Action Center, urged American Jewry to “speak more directly to the anti-Muslim bigotry in America today,” manifested by overwhelming public opposition to building a mosque – excuse me, “community center” – not far from the place where 3,000 Americans were murdered by individuals who were “the very negation of Islam” – except for the jihad thing.

At the same time, the Anti-Defamation League (which rarely misses a chance to defame conservative Christians) announced that it had organized an Interfaith Coalition on Mosques to respond to anti-Muslim blah, blah, blah, generated by attempts to build said temples of tolerance and understanding. The ADL does not deign to notice the fact that 80% of U.S. mosques contain extremist literature, according to the Mapping Sharia Project. And last August, the ADL’s inimitable Abraham Foxman did a commentary for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency titled “Shout Down the Sharia Myth Makers,” wherein he revealed that “concerns about creping Sharia” (Muslim law) are the “stuff of pure paranoid fantasy” and “pander to bigotry and fear.” For facilitating the spread of Islam in this country, which is just swell for the Jewish people, Foxman is rewarded with $624,000 annually. Sadly, the fine work of Foxman, Schneier, Saperstein and their colleagues is continually undermined by the deeds and words of Muslims. All over the world, the most horrific crimes are committed in the name of the Religion of Peace.

• In 2006, Parisian Jew Ilan Halimi was kidnapped and tortured to death by a Muslim gang – stabbed multiple times, burned with acid, and had cigarettes put out on his face. Finally, he was set on fire and dumped on railroad tracks. There were burns over 80% of his body. His screams could be heard for weeks throughout the Muslim tenement where he was held. No one called the police, but many joined in the fun.

• It takes a special kind of hatred to repeatedly stab an infant through the heart. Last year, in the Jewish community of Itamar, North of Jerusalem, Palestinians invaded the home of Ruth and Udi Fogel. The parents were killed. Then the practitioners of peace went to work on the kids. Yoav (age 11), Elad (age 4) and three-month old Hadas were stabbed through the heart and had their throats slit. Word of the atrocities was greeted with jubilation on the Palestinian street; where candy was distributed to children to celebrate this great victory over the Jewish people.

• In 2008, when terrorists of the Pakistani Lashkar-e-Taiba attacked the Indian city of Mumbai, they specifically targeted its Chabad House, run by Hasidic Jews. The terrorists were told by their handlers that, when it came to the body count, the lives Jews were worth “50 times those of non-Jews.” Among the victims were Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his pregnant wife Rivka, who were sexually assaulted and genitally mutilated. An Indian doctor who examined the bodies said he was “traumatized” by the brutality of the torture – thus demonstrating, if further proof was necessary, how much Muslims like Jews.

• Mirroring a pattern throughout Europe, the Jewish community of Malmo, Sweden has declined from 2,000 to 700 in the past 20 years. The exodus is paralleled by the growth of Malmo’s Muslims, now 60,000 out of a population of 280,000. With .0025% of the city’s population, Jews account for 45% of its hate crimes. Malmo Rabbi Shneur Kesselman told an interviewer in 2010: “In the past five years I’ve been here, I think you can count on your hand how many incidents (anti-Jewish hate crimes) there have been from the extreme right. In my personal experience, it’s 99% Muslim.” Guess who won’t be speaking at the next Jews Against Islamophobia conference?

Where do terrorists get such outlandish notions about Islam (that their faith requires them to kill Jews?) – from some of the leading religious authorities and personalities in the Muslim world. As the Imam of Mecca’s Grand Mosque, Abdul Rahman Al-Sudais probably knows a thing or two about Islam. Al-Sudais has called for the annihilation of the Jewish people. According to the Grand Imam, Jews are the “scum of the earth,” and the descendants of “monkeys and pigs,” a motif found in the Koran. Muhammad Hussein Yacoub, a prominent Salafi scholar, says: “We (Muslims) must believe that our fighting with the Jews is eternal, and it will not end until the final battle … until not a single Jew remains on the face of the earth”. The website of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood reads like Der Sturmer in Arabic. Laced with Holocaust denial and conspiracy theories, much space is devoted to an assessment of “the covetous and exploitive nature of the Jewish character.” “One day we will kill all Jews,” is a favorite chant at the group’s rallies. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Egyptian Brotherhood’s chief theologian, says Allah used Hitler to punish the Jews “for their corruption” and “Allah willing, the next time will be at the hands of believers.” This is the gang whose rise to power was abetted by Barack Obama.

Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Muhammed believes “the Jews rule the world by proxy. They invented socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong so they may enjoy equal rights with others.” Former Turkish Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan agrees, claiming the Jews decided to change Christianity by founding Protestantism, control China’s and India’s industrial development (also known as the Sino-Indo-Judeo-Protestant Conspiracy Theory) and “started 19 Crusades,” including World War I. When it comes to Jews, there is no charge too bizarre or farfetched not to be eagerly embraced by the Muslim street – including the modern equivalent of well-poisonings and the blood libel. A decade ago, “The Protocols of The Elders of Zion” was dramatized on Egyptian television. If an Arab leader falls out of favor with his subjects, rumors immediately begin circulating that he’s a crypto-Jew or has Jewish blood. This even includes rabid anti-Semites like Moammar Khadafy and Bashar al-Assad, who supports both Hamas and Hezbollah. The worst insult in the Arab world is to call someone a “Yahood” (Jew) – a favorite term of abuse for U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq.

How can anyone without ideological blinders fail to see it? Islam is the greatest threat to Jewish survival. Who wants to wipe Israel off the map – The Unitarian Universalist Republic of Iran? Whose rise to power in Egypt has driven anti-Semitic rhetoric to new heights – the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union? Immigrants of which faith community have fueled the greatest explosion of European anti-Semitism since Kristallnacht – the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? And still the liberal Jewish establishment and Jewish activists further left bleat about Islamophobia. Makes sense. For them, evidence is irrelevant, reality doesn’t exist and the Woolly Mammoth in the living room goes unnoticed. What they call Islamophobia is actually a healthy survival instinct. {GrassTopsUSA Exclusive Commentary – By Don Feder – 26.03.2012: Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer who is now a political/communications consultant. He also maintains his own website, DonFeder.com}.

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Christians need not apply for immigration to US

It is plain as the nose on your face. Almost the entire Western elite hates Christianity with a passion. Using tax payer funds, they blunder into military conflicts in the Middle East knowing full well that the local Christians will be massacred, banished, persecuted, their churches burned, etc, and yet when it comes to providing refuge for these Christians, Western powers are increasingly reluctant to open their doors, preferring instead to embrace the hordes of Muslims from those regions, flooding Western nations with refuges who show their gratitude by demanding handouts (much of the social assistance in Europe goes to them) and complaining about the lack of Sharia law and the sexual behavior of locals, and by raping local women and in some cases, disposing of the evidence by murder. Yes, these are upstanding would-be citizens, that’s for sure.

Obama is the first president to routinely deny these hapless frightened people visas to the US, while contributing to the heat-up of the hell they cannot escape. Yet, without the “Christian” vote, this miscreant would never have been elected! How is that for lemming-like self immolation? Certainly, Christians with common sense and traditional values believe that the hell awaiting persecutors of Christians is hotter than the one in which Middle East Christians live, and it is not temporary. WND reports below on the dismal outlook for Christians in Muslim nations desirous of escaping their persecutors. It is well-known in the Christian communities in Muslim nations that they will not even be considered for immigrant status to the United States, even if they already have relatives here. The Obama administration is importing hundreds of thousands of Muslim “refugees” and using Nashville and Atlanta as hubs to resettle them as a means of busting the Bible Belt, which is a traditional foe of the Democratic Party. I firmly believe that some day, when all of the filthy, sleazy tactics and anti-Christian and anti-tradition policies of these elites become obvious to enough people, through the efforts of bloggers and citizens passing the word, there will be a huge revolution everywhere. Whether it will be peaceful or violent is hard to say at this point. {www.wnd.com – Don Hank}

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OBAMA MUSLIM ADVISER WARNS ASSAD CAN’T DELIVER ”RESISTANCE TO ISRAEL”

Obama’s Muslim Adviser: Assad Too Soft on Israel

A Muslim adviser to the Obama White House tweeted last week that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad can’t deliver ‘resistance to Israel.’ A Muslim adviser to U.S. President Barack Obama warned in a post on the Twitter social networking site last week that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad can’t deliver ‘resistance to Israel.’ The adviser, Egyptian-born Dalia Mohaded, is employed in the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, at the White House. The tweet, posted on March 10 and picked up by the media watchdog Jihadwatch, read as follows: “To those siding w/Assad: he cannot deliver stability, protection of minorities, or resistance to Israel. He is a killer w/o legitimacy. The tweet has sparked numerous responses in media, on the Internet and on Twitter reflecting concerns that Mohaded appeared to be more concerned about the Syrian president’s inability to carry out “resistance to Israel” — which is a key U.S. ally — than his compassion for his own people, and his murderous rampages against them. More than 8,000 Syrians have died at the hands of government forces since the Arab Spring uprising a year agosparked brutal retaliation by Assad loyalists against civilian protesters, including torture, rape and other atrocities. Many of the victims were women and children. Turkey has reported at least 14,000 refugeesfrom Syria have crossed the border near Idlib into its territory; the United Nations estimates that more than 200,000 people have been left homelessby the burgeoning civil war in which Assad’s troops have fired heavy artillery at city neighborhoods in order to suppress the uprising. The issue of Mogahed’s questionable priorities has also been raised by the Family Security Matters (FSM) organization, who noted that Mogahed serves on the U.S. Homeland Security Council, and is an executive at the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies and its polling center. “Mogahed has been a tenacious defender of groups like the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), both of which are tied to the Muslim Brotherhood, points out FSM in a post on the organization’s website. CAIR was one of some 300 unindicted co-conspirators in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation conviction in which the organization was shut down for illegally channeling funds to the Hamas terrorist rulers of Gaza. The organization insists that it is a civil rights group focused on promoting understanding of Islam and dedicated to fighting discriminating against Muslim Americans.

This fits in with the fact that Bashar al-Assad is pro-Christian. The West’s opposition to Mubarak and Ghaddafi was also based in large part on the fact that these men did not oppose Christianity or Israel. Western leaders did an evil thing in ousting them, and it was on purpose, not a mistake. Obama’s opposition to Assad is also based on Assad’s lack of resistance to Israel and Christians. (WND reports that no Christians are given asylum in the US under Obama, even though he knows many will be slaughtered).Don Hank

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YEMEN:Young students demand justice for Joel Shrum, the American English teacher executed by Muslim terrorists

Al-Qaeda Islamic terrorists claimed responsibility for the killing, accusing Shrum of trying to convert Muslims. Meanwhile, the people Shrum devoted his life to are mourning the loss of their beloved teacher and friend and are demanding the murderers be caught and tried.

The young Yemenis said Shrum was gunned down in his car for no good reason. He had worked in the Islamic nation for the past two years, teaching poor people English and vocational skills. ”Mr. Joel came all the way from the United States of America, having nothing but good intentions to help and teach the people of Taiz.” Shrum is survived by his wife and 2 young boys, who moved with him to Yemen in 2009.

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UK: Another day, another MUSLIM Paedophile sex gang arrested

Six (Pakistani?) MUSLIM men have been remanded in custody after making their first appearance in court accused of preying on vulnerable young girls and grooming them for sex.

Press Association The men were arrested along with seven others by police investigating claims that 24 girls under 16 were targeted by an Oxford-based gang. A total of 34 charges were read out, including rape, conspiring to rape a child, arranging child prostitution and trafficking as the men appeared in two separate hearings at High Wycombe Magistrates’ Court, Buckinghamshire. Brothers Anjum Dogar, 30, and Akhtar Dogar, 31, both of Tawney Street, Oxford, and Kamar Jamil, 26, of Aldrich Road, Oxford, sat together in the dock dressed in sportswear while prosecutor Clare Tucker listed the charges against each of them.

Hospital porter Akhtar Dogar is accused of three counts of rape, one count of conspiring to rape a child, three counts of arranging the prostitution of a child, one count of making a threat to kill and one count of trafficking, which are alleged to have been carried out between May 2004 and July 2010.

Unemployed Anjum Dogar is charged with one count of conspiring to rape a child, one count of arranging prostitution of a child and one count of trafficking between July 2005 and July 2010. Security guard and father-of-two Jamil faces four counts of rape, two counts of arranging the prostitution of a child, one count of making a threat to kill and one count of possession of cocaine with intent to supply between May 2004 and March of this year. The three other defendants appeared in the dock in a separate hearing later. Ms Tucker said unemployed Zeshan Ahmed, 26, of Palmer Road, Headington, Oxford, is charged with 10 counts of engaging in sexual activity with a child between January 2010 and January this year.

Unemployed Mohammed Karrar, 37, of Cowley Road, Oxford, is accused of two counts of conspiracy to rape a child and one count of supplying a class A drug, namely cocaine, to a child between July 2004 and July 2009. Meanwhile his brother, security guard Bassan Karrar, 32, of no fixed address, is charged with a single count of rape alleged to have been carried out against a 14-year-old girl in November 2006. The offences relate to girls who were under the age of 16 at the time, the court heard.

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A report to the Attorney General

against Ghoneim for insulting the Pope after his death

The Attorney General was reported against Sheik Wagdy Ghoneim for a YouTube video showing him insulting the Pope Shenouda after his death and describing it as “Perishing of the head of infidelity” which is considered offensive for the late Pope and his children of the Copts as well as all over the world. The lawyers Said Fayez, Sarwat Bakheet, and Nabil Ghobrial expressed in the report their resentment over the words of Sheik Ghoneim, objecting that he shouldn’t even be called as Sheik for he misses the wisdom of the elderly. They said that Ghoneim has defamed Christianity and offended Christians not taking into considerations the feelings of the Egyptians and especially the Copts after the death of a great religion figure that was known for his patriotism, and they asked that he should be judged on his words. {20 March 2012 By: Amany Moussa}

Salafi MP: Al-Nour Party will

not participate in the Pope’s funeral!

MP Mohamed Abdel Wahab Kurdi of Al-Nour party told Copts United that Islam prevents from attending the funerals or entering the tombs of Christians, however we can help washing their dead bodies. Kurdi added that Pope Shenouda was very quiet, wise and understanding who could handle all kinds of situations. He said that Egypt has lost a man who gave strength to the Church, and revived Christianity among the Christians of Egypt. Kurdi expressed his fear that some splits and problems could occur after his death. {By-Emad Tomas | 19 March 2012}

MPs of People’s Assembly stand a moment of silence…

some Salafis refuse

Dr. Saad Katatni, head of People’s Assembly has asked the members of the Council to stand up for a minute as a moment of respect for Pope Shenouda III. While most of MPs have stood up, some of the Salafis refused to stand up and were sitting in their places. Moreover, heads of parliamentary bodies and members of the government have offered their condolences for the death of Pope Shenouda. On the other hand, field Marshal Tantawi, decided to declare public mourning tomorrow for the departure of Pope Shenouda. {By-Emad Tomas | 20 March 2012}

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The Long Arm of Saudi Blasphemy Laws

Hamza Kashgari, a 23-year-old columnist, stands accused of blasphemy in his homeland of Saudi Arabia for tweets he posted on Islam’s prophet Mohammed that many of his countrymen find insulting to Islam. In his postings on the occasion of Mohammed’s birthday last week, Kashgari imagined a skeptical discussion with the founder of Islam. Many Saudis are enraged, demanding that he be arrested and put to death, in accordance with Saudi sharia. As the New York Times reported, “more than 13,000 people [the number now tops 14,000] have joined a Facebook page titled ‘The Saudi People Demand the Execution of Hamza Kashgari'”. His apologies and deletions of the postings were rejected as insufficient by the offended Muslims and, more significantly, by Saudi Arabia’s council of senior Islamic scholars, who issued a fatwa condemning him and demanding that he be put on trial. Kashgari fled for his life. He went to Malaysia, a purportedly moderate Muslim country, for refuge. King Abdullah issued an arrest warrant and called for Kashgari’s extradition. He was taken into detention at Kuala Lumpur international airport on February 9, as he tried to catch a flight to New Zealand.

The British Guardian is now reporting that Kashgari was caught after Interpol, the 190-country-member international police agency based in Lyon, France, issued an alert for him at the request of Saudi Arabia. If true, this violates the Article 3 neutrality clause of Interpol’s constitution, which states that it is “strictly forbidden” for the organization to undertake any intervention of a religious character. If this is allowed to become a precedent, the longtime goal of Saudi Arabia — and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation — of a universal law punishing “defamation of Islam” will essentially be realized. Meanwhile, back in the Kingdom, Hadi Al-Mutif, one of the longest-held religious prisoners in the world, was released from prison on a blasphemy charge on Friday, February 10. He was imprisoned as a teenager in 1994 for an offhand remark he made about Islam’s prophet and was sentenced to death. While on death row for 18 years, he was the subject of worldwide appeals, which undoubtedly played a role in sparing his life. He was freed after being granted a pardon by the king. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom found that Al-Mutif, a member of the kingdom’s large Shiite minority, had “suffered tremendously” during his imprisonment, both physically and emotionally. {By Nina Shea:National Review Online – Nina Shea is the director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom and co-author, with Paul Marshall, of Silenced: How Apostasy & Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide (Oxford University Press, 2011)}.

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After the hope of the Arab Spring, the chill of an Arab Winter

Hard-line Islamists are openly skeptical of democracy, seeing it as a means of gaining power and not as a model for governing

One year after a Tunisian fruit vendor set himself on fire in an act of defiance that would ignite protests and unseat long-standing dictatorships, a harsh chill is settling over the Arab world. The peaceful demonstrations in Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen that were supposed to bring democracy have instead given way to bloodshed and chaos, with the forces of tyranny trying to turn back the clock. It is too soon to say that the Arab Spring is gone, never to resurface. But the Arab Winter has clearly arrived. Tunisia, where it all began, recently carried out free elections. But that country — small, ethnically and religiously homogenous, and prosperous — was always a more likely candidate for a successful transition to democracy. Elsewhere in the Middle East, Saudi troops helped orchestrate a crackdown on demonstrators in Bahrain, regime forces gun down protesters in Syria, and Yemen crumbles into civil war, with al-Qaeda running rampant in the countryside. In Libya, we see warlords, Islamists, tribal leaders and would-be democrats vying for power in the post-Gaddafi world. And in Egypt, where the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in February gave us the defining images of the Arab Spring, the military is trying to keep its hands on power.

So what went wrong — and what will an Arab Winter mean for the Middle East, the United States and the rest of the world?

The reason the Middle East has long seemed like infertile soil for democracy is not because Arab peoples do not want to vote or otherwise be free — poll after poll confirms the opposite — but rather because entrenched dictators had long imprisoned or killed dissenters, bought off opponents, undermined civil society, and divided or intimidated their people. And when dictators fall, their means of preserving power do not always fall with them. In Egypt, the military ushered Mubarak out of office, but stayed in as a supposed caretaker and is reluctant to relinquish power. Now the security forces have again shot people in Tahrir Square. In Yemen and Libya, tribes and other power centers often opposed the old order, but they saw one another as rivals, too. Throughout the region, the police and the judiciary are broken after years of dictatorship, but there is nothing to take their place. Moreover, the demonstrations that led to the ouster of rulers such as Mubarak and Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali hardly offered a clear governing alternative. Although they embodied a genuine outpouring of popular rage, the protests were largely leaderless and loosely organized, often via social media; there was no African National Congress or Corazon Aquino to take the reins. You cannot govern by flash mob. And the opposition voices that were organized were not necessarily the most democratic. With the Arab Spring, Islamist forces rose to prominence. In Tunisia, a moderate Islamist party won victory in the October elections, gaining 89 of 217 seats in parliament, dwarfing the 29 seats of its nearest — secular — competitor. In Morocco, where the king has opened the political system somewhat, the Islamist party likewise won a plurality of the vote in the November elections.

Disciplined by years underground, Islamist groups have popular support because of the social services they provide and the repression they suffered. They were allowed to have a role in society but with limited political participation. Now that groups such as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood are poised to do well in free parliamentary elections, they are unlikely to accept those old bargains with the military junta in Egypt or other old-regime forces elsewhere. Brotherhood leaders have learned to mouth a commitment to pluralism and tolerance, but it is unclear that they would act on it when in power. More hard-line Islamists are openly skeptical of democracy, seeing it as a means of gaining power and not as a model for governing. Egyptian salafists, who espouse a more puritanical version of Islam, have also entered the political system and are performing unexpectedly well in the elections; their demands for Islamicizing society are extreme and may push the Brotherhood to pursue a more radical agenda when in power. These domestic forces often deter democracy in subtle ways, but some other reactionary forces are more brazen. In March, Saudi troops drove across the causeway to neighboring Bahrain, backing a brutal crackdown against Shiite protesters. At home and abroad, the Saudis have spent tens of billions to buy off dissent. Riyadh has pushed fellow monarchs in the Arabian Peninsula and in Jordan to stop any revolutionary movements, and the Saudis are offering a haven for dictators down on their luck, such as Tunisia’s Ben Ali.

The Saudi royals not only worry about their own power diminishing, but fear that change elsewhere would be an opening for their arch-rival Iran and for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. As Middle East expert Bruce Riedel puts it, the Saudis have proclaimed a 21st-century version of the Soviet-era Brezhnev doctrine: “No revolution will be tolerated in a bordering kingdom.” A faltering Arab Spring doesn’t mean we will return to a world of dictators and secret police. Not only are Mubarak, Ben Ali and Moammar Gaddafi gone, but so are the cults of personality they nurtured. Bashar al-Assad may cling to power in Syria, but he will be isolated abroad and hollow at home. Even regimes that have experienced limited unrest — Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Algeria — are entering a new era. Where old regimes survive, they will be weak; where new ones come in, they will be weaker, because old institutions can be destroyed more quickly than new ones can be built. Both new and old leaders must play to public opinion, and this may lead to rash, incoherent foreign policies, as politicians make campaign promises that are not in their countries’ interests to fulfill.

Israel, of course, is the easiest card to play. A Pew Research Center poll taken after Mubarak’s fall found that Egyptians favored annulling the 32-year-old peace treaty with Israel by 54 percent to 36 percent, and — no surprise — many mainstream leaders have criticized it. Indeed, Israel can serve as a perfect diversion to struggling governments. In May, as unrest swept across Syria, the regime encouraged Palestinians to march across the Syrian border into the Golan Heights, leading to four deaths when an Israeli border patrol shot Palestinians as they broke through a frontier fence. Even if violence involving Israel does not escalate, a renewed push for peace seems unlikely. “The ugly facts,” wrote former Israeli defense minister Moshe Arens, “are that the two peace treaties that Israel concluded so far — the one with Egypt and the other with Jordan — were both signed with dictators: Anwar Sadat and King Hussein.” It is hard to imagine new leaders, who need to play to anti-Israel public opinion, sitting down with their Israeli counterparts to advance peace. Anti-Americanism is also likely to rise in the Arab Winter — and it matters much more now that governments will seek to be in tune with public sentiment. After Mubarak’s fall, for example, only one in five Egyptians had a favorable view of the United States (just slightly higher than under Mubarak), and even in Mideast nations that are allied with Washington, majorities identify the United States and Israel among the top two threats to their security. One of the ironies of U.S. support for democratic change is that the autocrats have traditionally been more pro-American than the democrats. Now, forces of the old regimes feel that Washington abandoned them at their most vulnerable time, and Jordan and Saudi Arabia are livid that the United States abruptly dumped Mubarak and question the U.S. commitment to their security.

The United States may end up with the worst of both worlds: scorned by the forces of democracy because of its ties to dictators, but disdained by dictators — whose cooperation is vital to U.S. economic and security interests — for reaching out to democrats. The most dangerous outcome of the Arab Winter, however, is the spread of chaos and violence. In Syria, where thousands have already died, the body count may grow exponentially as sectarian killings spread and peaceful protesters take up arms. In Yemen, the resignation of Ali Abdullah Saleh has not ended the turmoil throughout the country. And Libya, lacking strong institutions and divided by tribal and political factions, may never get its new government off the ground. If unrest spreads, families will leave their homes, burdening neighboring states and incubating fighters for future conflicts. Perhaps 1 million Libyans sought refuge in nearby countries while civil war raged there this year. Tens of thousands of Syrians have fled, and more will leave if the violence there escalates — as it shows every sign of doing. In Turkey, Syrian refugees could become a source of recruits for a future opposition army that would fight the regime in Damascus. These conflicts could widen if neighbors intervene, whether because they fear more instability or because they want to consolidate their influence across borders. Saudi Arabia has long meddled in Yemen, for example, and the collapse of that regime may lead the Saudis to move directly against al-Qaeda forces and other perceived threats there. Meanwhile, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Jordan and Israel all have strong interests in Syria and may arm factions or otherwise get involved simply to offset their rivals. Neighboring Lebanon’s history of civil war and foreign intervention offers a depressing precedent for how a local conflict can drag in neighbors.

Distrusted and broke, the United States can do little to make the Arab Winter better, but it can do a lot to make it worse. The value and possibility of economic aid, for instance, are questionable. Regimes such as Mubarak’s used American aid to prop themselves up and resist democracy. While supporting new democratic parties is a better use of dollars, it is hard to imagine a budget-conscious Congress approving serious aid for new governments that will inevitably include anti-American Islamist groups with a questionable commitment to democracy. Nor would the region’s true democrats necessarily welcome U.S. support, with its stench of foreign interference. Washington has the most influence with the region’s militaries, but supporting them presents a dilemma. Militaries were supposed to be the “orderly” part of an orderly transition to democracy in the Middle East, but as Egypt’s experience makes clear, most officers want to keep their perks and power, and U.S. support can help them do that. Outside Egypt, militaries are politicized by tribe (Yemen), sect (Syria) and loyalty to the old order (everywhere), making them part of the problem, not the solution.

The Arab Spring began without U.S. help, and the people of the region will be the ones to determine its future. Washington should recognize that change is coming and support it, especially in key power centers such as Egypt. But inevitably it will play catch-up, managing crises where it can or must to keep instability from spreading. This could involve helping refugees, using diplomacy to try to prevent neighbors from intervening and escalating a conflict, and continuing to aggressively pursue al-Qaeda affiliates so they do not threaten Arab nations or the United States. Just a few months ago, President Obama optimistically declared that, across the Arab world, “those rights that we take for granted are being claimed with joy by those who are prying loose the grip of an iron fist.” We can hope that Tunisia will lead the region not only in loosening that grip, but in creating real democracy through free elections. However, we must also recognize that the Arab Spring may not bring freedom to much, or even most, of the Arab world. Even as the United States prepares to work with the region’s new democracies, it also must prepare for the chaos, stagnation and misrule that will mark the Arab Winter.

{Written by Daniel Byman – Washington Post – dlb32@georgetown.edu – This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it – Daniel Byman is a professor in the security studies program at Georgetown University}

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The landscape of the Middle East has been changing significantly, and in the midst of revolutions, uprisings, terrorist attacks and general social unrest, there is a small but significant group of individuals trying to live an increasingly difficult situation. It is often forgotten that Christianity actually started in those lands that are now overtaken by conflict. Whether following the Western calendar celebrating Christmas on 25 December or, as we do in the Coptic Orthodox Church, following the Julian calendar celebrating it on 7 January, Christians in the Middle East are experiencing this year’s Nativity Feast in an uncertain and volatile climate. The place that was to be the springboard to “peace on earth and goodwill towards men”, as proclaimed by the angels at the birth of Christ, has unfortunately become a fertile ground for conflict and fragmentation. On 9 December of this year, a House of Lords debate on Christians in the Middle East gave an inspiring and encouraging message of overwhelming consensus that Christianity was an essential and integral part of the Middle East, and that the decreasing presence of Christians and Christian communities is a sad loss for that region, and indeed for the whole world. Focusing on Egypt, home to the Coptic Orthodox Church, the largest Christian denomination in the Middle East, and an indigenous Church since the first Century, we see an increasingly uncertain time ahead, not only for Christians, but for the whole nation. Egypt is now living a state of unprecedented political freedom, which has ironically lead to greater instability and the appearance of radical and conflicting political and religious ideologies.

While this may indeed be a healthy sign in more democratically-developed nations, in a country like Egypt, currently economically devastated, with a vulnerable electorate hampered by extreme poverty and illiteracy, this creates an uneasy climate and gives rise to the potential manipulation of that electorate. Having said that, we have not in the past, and do not intend now, to live with the spirit of defeat or self-pity. The Christian message is one of power and hope; overcoming evil with good, and uncertainty with the knowledge of, and trust in, a true and faithful God. As we all celebrate these festive days, let us remember our brethren in the Middle East, hoping that all has not been in vain, but actually leads to a greater understanding and practice of true democracy and respect for the rights of every individual. We must also remember that for many millions of Christians in the Middle East, along with their brethren in Nigeria who on Christmas Day experienced such tragedy at what should have been a time of sacred celebration, these days commemorate the birth of the Incarnate Word, Who is still the source of the hope, courage and resilience with which they live till today.

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Christian mother “forced out of Heathrow job after hate campaign by Muslim fundamentalists”!

‘They say that Jesus is s***** and bullied a Christian friend of mine so much for wearing her crosses that she came to me crying’

A worker who claims she was the victim of a race-hate campaign by fundamentalist Muslims because of her Christian beliefs has launched a landmark case against her former employers. Nouhad Halawi, a saleswoman at Heathrow Airport’s World Duty Free shop, said she and other Christian staff were systematically harassed by Muslims. She alleged the intimidation included: {I was told I would go to hell, claims worker – Muslims telling her she would go to hell if she didn’t convert to Islam – A Muslim colleague insisting she read the Koran – ‘Muslims made fun of colleague wearing crosses’ – Lost job after speaking out about ‘extremist’ bullying – Bullying a friend at the airport for wearing crosses – That Jews were responsible for the September 11 terrorist attacks}.

Mrs Halawi lost her job at the perfume counter in Terminal 3 in July after 13 years when she spoke out about bullying by a small group of ‘extremist’ Muslims at the airport. The mother-of-two had been the subject of a complaint by an Islamic colleague but when she raised her own concerns as a Christian, she said she was the one who was dismissed. Her case for unfair dismissal is being supported by the Christian Legal Centre, who believe it raises important legal issues over whether Muslims and Christians are treated differently by employers. Mrs Halawi, 47, who came to Britain from Lebanon in 1977, said: ‘I have been sacked on the basis of unsubstantiated complaints. ‘There is now great fear amongst my former colleagues that the same could happen to them if one of the Muslims turns on them. This is supposed to be a Christian country, but the law seems to be on the side of the Muslims.’

She says that she had always got on well with her Muslim colleagues,but the atmosphere changed with a growing number of employees promoting ‘fundamentalist Islam’. Mrs Halawi told the Sunday Telegraph: ‘One man brought in the Koran to work and insisted I read it and another brought in Islamic leaflets and handed them out to other employees. ‘They said that 9/11 served the Americans right and that they hated the West, but that they had come here because they want to convert people to Islam. ‘They say that Jesus is s***** and bullied a Christian friend of mine so much for wearing her crosses that she came to me crying.’ She claimed she became a targeted for the fundamentalists after she stood up for her friend who wants to be anonymous because she still works at the terminal. In May, five of her Muslim colleagues complained to David Tunnicliffe, the trading manager at World Duty Free, accusing her of being anti-Islamic following a heated conversation in the store.

According to the Telegraph, her description of a Muslim colleague as an allawhi – ‘man of God’ in Arabic – sparked a row when another worker overheard the remark and thought she said Alawi, which was his branch of Islam. Following the complaints she was suspended but was not told on what grounds until she met Mr Tunnicliffe in July. Two days after the meeting she received a letter withdrawing her Heathrow security pass – needed to work at World Duty Free – because her comments were deemed ‘extremely inappropriate.’ Mrs Halawi, paid at World Duty Free on a freelance basis by cosmetic staff agency Caroline South Associates, was told that she would not be unable to continue working without her pass. A petition signed by 28 colleagues, some of them Muslims, argued that she has been dismissed on the basis of ‘malicious lies.’ The Christian Legal Centre has instructed Paul Diamond, a leading human rights barrister, to represent Mrs Halawi in taking both Caroline South Associates and Autogrill Retail UK Limited, which trades as World Duty Free, to an employment tribunal. A lawyer acting for CSA told the Sunday Telegraph: ‘The case is still pending so the company is not in a position to comment, but as far as the company is concerned she’s never been an employee and has never been dismissed.’ A World Duty Free spokesman said they were unable to comment because of ‘ongoing legal proceedings’. Last week, Jewish businessman Arieh Zucker complained that he has been repeatedly singled out for full-body scans by Muslim security staff at the airport. The 41-year-old mortgage broker, from London, has accused them of ‘race hate’ and is threatening to sue for racial discrimination after being made to ‘feel like a criminal’ while being scanned. {Daily Mail, London – 28 Nov 2011Written by Craig Mackenzie}

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Muslim Prayers of Hate

Someone recently sent me an Arabic video that juxtaposes snippets of sermons delivered by Christian and Muslim leaders in the Middle East. [Note: Two days after this article first appeard on PJ Media, YouTube removed the video.] The Christian preachers offer up universal supplications that include phrases like “O lord, lover of all mankind and savior of all the world”; they quote biblical passages such as “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt 5: 44); they pray that God may “heal all people around the world of their diseases.” While such prayers are familiar, taken for granted even, the supplications of the Muslim preachers may surprise some. Popular Egyptian preacher, Sheikh Muhammad al-Zoghbi, was taped invoking his god thusly: {May Allah cut your tongue out! May he freeze the blood in your veins! May he inflict you with cancer and allow you no reprieve… Allah, strike them with all sorts of disease, afflictions and pain! Allah, strike them with cancer! Allah, let your prophet overpower them! Allah destroy them! Allah destroy them! Allah destroy them! Allah destroy the criminals who challenge the noble prophet! [Then, very serenely addressing his Muslim viewers:] And peace upon you, and Allah’s mercy and blessings}.

Likewise, Sheikh Abdullah Nihari supplicated Allah with outstretched arms accordingly: {Allah, we condemn them before you!! Freeze the blood in their veins!! Strike them with evil, or at the very least freeze the blood in their veins — until they pray for death, but do not receive it!! O Allah! O Allah! O Allah}! One need not understand Arabic to appreciate the intensity of Nihari’s hate: watch the 45 seconds starting at minute 2:15, and see the gesticulating cleric issue his curse — while striking the floor with a stick, hurling a picture, and pounding on the wall. Also shown was a snippet of formal prayers at Mecca, Islam’s holiest city. As Muslims circumambulated around the Ka’ba, the following supplications were blasted on a megaphone, chanted to by Islam’s devotees: {O Allah vanquish the unjust Christians and the criminal Jews, the unjust traitors; strike them with your wrath; make their lives hostage to misery; drape them with endless despair, unrelenting pain and unremitting ailment; fill their lives with sorrow and pain and end their lives in humiliation and oppression; inflict your tortures and punishments upon the unjust Christians and criminal Jews. This is our supplication, Allah; grant us our request}!

What to make of this immense contrast between Christian and Muslim prayers to the deity? Of course, in former times, these contradicting approaches would simply have been interpreted as natural reflections of the divine and the diabolical. Today, however, when moral relativism portrays all religions equally — that is, all are equally meaningless with no tangible impact on their devotees’ lives — many may conclude that the Christian prayers, calm and grateful, evince Christian contentment under Islam, whereas the Muslim prayers, irate if not insane, evince sincere grievance. Nothing could be further from the truth. If prayers and supplications were mere reflections of one’s level of contentment or discontentment with this world, then surely the Christians of the Muslim world—where churches and Bibles are burned, Christian girls are abducted and forced to convert, blasphemy and apostasy laws kill, and even the state massacres Christians—would be praying for fire and pestilence to descend upon their persecutors.

Conversely, Muslim leaders are quick to point to anything to rationalize their prayers of hate. Thus when Professor Abd al-Latif was asked if Sharia law permits Muslims to pray for the “annihilation” of Jews and Christians, he said yes, since Jews are unjust to Palestinians and Christians are responsible for Abu Ghraib, adding that “the prophet himself used to invoke curses.” Indeed, Muhammad—who counseled cursing Islam’s enemies by, among other things, telling them to bite their father’s penis—condemned and called violence against Christians and Jews, beginning in his Quran’s opening prayer, the Fatiha, which Muhammad uttered some thirteen centuries before the creation of the modern state of Israel and the events of Abu Ghraib—that is, before any “grievances.” The lesson? Prayers do not reflect one’s contentment with the world; they reflect the teachings of one’s faith.

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To Yousri Fouda you walked away: Dina Rasmy said she is ashamed or working for the state Media – Yousri Fouda says: the guys who are ruling this country are worse than Mubarak

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Egyptian businessman and founder of the Free Egyptians Party, Naguib Sawiris, said extremist Islamist groups were being funded from abroad.

Egyptian businessman and founder of the Free Egyptians Party, Naguib Sawiris, is holding the ruling military council responsible for the deadly Maspero clashes, which he described as an unforgiveable crime. In an interview with Al Arabiya TV’s “Point of Order” with Hasan Muawad, Sawiris, who is a Copt, rejected reports that blamed “infiltrators” for the deadly clashes between Coptic Christians and Egyptian security and army forces. The Oct. 9 event resulted in the deaths of 28 people, most of them Coptic demonstrators. While some activists and bloggers at the scene of the clashes accused military forces of firing at peaceful Coptic protesters, Coptic church officials said “strangers” had incited the violence.

Sawiris, 57, blamed the supreme military council for the violence because, he said, it was partially responsible for safeguarding national security. “The cause of sectarian problems is the lack of law enforcement to prosecute those responsible for attacking houses of worship,” He said referring for to the military rulers’ failure to bring those who attacked a Christian church in the south of the country. Sawiris said he had opposed the Maspero protest, even though members of his party took part in it. Following the violence, some Egyptian Copts who live abroad called for international protection for the Egyptian Christian minority. Sawiris told Al Arabiya that such calls only hurt the Coptic cause and that it is “un-Egyptian” to call for foreign interference in the country’s domestic affairs. Sawiris rejected attempts to mix religion with politics in the post-revolutionary Egypt and said that if the Muslim Brotherhood, which uses the expression “Islam is the solution” as its slogan, wins the election, his party, however few seats it may win, would form a serious opposition. He also accused the Brotherhood of obtaining dubious funds from unidentified foreign parties to run their election campaigns. He said liberal parties in Egypt are lacking in funding.

“The reality is that we have entered a race that is unfair. We are all parties that were born in the last six or eight months. We do not have extensive experience about the electoral process and we do not have financial resources,” Sawiris said. “A large amount of funding is coming from abroad for the Muslims brotherhood movement and for the extremist Islamist powers in Egypt.” He criticized what he said was an unclear political agenda of the Egyptian Islamists. “They refuse the model of the Tunisian Islamist Ennahda party and they reject the Turkish model. I don’t know what they want to do here in Egypt. If they win, they will likely turn the clock back.” Sawiris was executive chairman of Wind Telecom and Orascom Telecom Holding (OTH) before he stepped down and pursued politics. He launched Egypt’s first Mobile operator, Mobinil, in 1998. (By Al Arabiya – DUBAI: Written by Mustapha Ajbaili)

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‘Sharia’ in the new Middle East

Libyans hold up flags that read in Arabic, “There is no god but God” as they rally to listen to National Transitional Council chief Mustafa Abdel Jalil, in support of imposing Islamic sharia law, in the eastern coastal city of Benghazi, on October 28, 2011. (ABDULLAH DOMA – AFP/GETTY IMAGES) When mass protests broke out across the Middle East and North Africa earlier in the year, pundits and politicians across Europe and North America worried that radical Islamists would hijack the revolutions and impose sharia law across the region. Now, elections in Tunisia have brought the mildly Islamist Ennahda party to power, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is taking a more active role in post-revolutionary Egypt, and Mustafa Abdul Jalil, the leader of Libya’s interim National Transition Council, has announced that the country would adopt sharia as the supreme law of the land. And so the cries of an impeding Islamist takeover of the Middle East have erupted once more in the western press.

But before we give in to our inner Glenn Beck, let’s get a few things straight. First of all, the prospect of any of these countries transforming into another Islamic Republic of Iran is almost nil. It should be noted that Ennahda, which models itself after Turkey’s enormously successful Justice and Development (AK) Party, has repeatedly said it has no desire to impose sharia-inspired penal codes on Tunisia. Indeed, it is already in talks with liberal and secular parties about forming a coalition government. In Egypt, the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood has certainly increased, but it in no way dominates the political landscape of the country. On the contrary, the Muslim Brotherhood has yet to poll beyond 20 percent in any pre-election survey. In any case, like the Ennahda, the Muslim Brotherhood has also sworn off imposing a conservative interpretation of sharia law, which, according to Egypt’s current constitution, is already the basis of the country’s laws.

That leaves Libya as the only post-revolutionary country in which the transitional government has explicitly called for implementing sharia. I would venture to say that Jalil’s announcement has widespread support across Libya. The country is predominantly Muslim and it can be expected that, given the freedom of an option, the majority of the population will opt for a far greater role for religion in government than what was allowed under Gaddafi. As I have written before in these pages, that is not in and of itself a bad thing. For generations, the dictatorial regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya violently repressed any hint of religious opposition. With the dictators gone, it is only natural for the proverbial pendulum to swing toward a greater role for religion in society. It will take many years of dialogue and debate, trial and error, for these societies to come to a comfortable accommodation between the religious faith of their majority populations and the necessary requirements for a stable and modern democracy. (Remember, the United States has had a 250 year head start and we are still grappling with the role of religion in our government and society). Those are precisely the kinds of public debates we want people in the region to have.

There is, of course, no room in the modern world for draconian punishments like stoning for adultery and cutting off of hands for theft that one sees in places like Iran or Saudi Arabia. But – and this is what so many in the West, for whom sharia is synonymous with radical fundamentalism, fail to understand – those punishments are not what the vast majority of those who call for sharia have in mind. As Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman notes in The Rise and Fall of the Islamic State , for a great many Muslims living in countries where the law rests upon the whims of a dictator, sharia is merely code for “rule of law.” Sharia means that there is something written down and codified that can be relied upon by all citizens as a concrete expression of what is and what is not permissible. Further, for many of these newly free populations, sharia is a less a legal code than it is a form of identity, a means of espousing particular values and norms that were conspicuously absent during the corrupt and inept regimes of their ousted dictators.

For the last four decades Libya has been under the rule of a murderous megalomaniac who deprived the country of any form of a civil society by creating a confusing and ultimately egocentric government. Now that the dictator is no more, Libyans are looking for a common foundation upon which to build a new society. The foundation they are most familiar with is Islam. Can such a foundation ultimately lead to a repressive theocracy? Yes. But it can also lead to a modern constitutional state that protects the rights of its citizens. Libya’s choice still lays ahead. But this much seems certain: The people of the new Middle East, having thrown off the yoke of one set of (secular) dictators, do not appear in the mood to replace them with another (religious) set. {By Reza Aslan – Reza Aslan is the author of No god but God and founder of AslanMedia.com, an online journal for news and entertainment about the Middle East. Follow him @RezaAslan and @AslanMedia}

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Surprise! The Egyptian Christians are being persecuted more than ever now that Egyptians are “Democratic.”

(Notice how the US has been exporting democracy even though we were founded as a constitutional republic. That in itself was a huge red flag largely ignored by all).

Of course, if more people had read Laigle’s Forum, there would have been little support for the Western movement to overthrow all the stable governments in the Middle East that were friendly or at least neutral toward the indigenous Christian population. More than anything else, the governments we declared to be “undemocratic” were holding the social fabric together. Here’s what I said in 8 separate commentaries on this subject, starting last spring — yes, the “Arab” spring (it doesn’t pay to ignore the bloggers. In fact, you might even say it does pay to pretty much ignore all commentary by the MSM): http://laiglesforum.com/my-government-is-killing-me/2159.htm

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UK Muslim Gang Rape 100 Teenage Girls

Wheres The Outrage In PC UK Media?

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All Rapes in 2010 Committed By Muslims, Say Oslo Police

Defenders of Islam call it a “religion of peace” but many Norwegian women are learning that Islam is the religion of rape. According to an amazing police report released there this month, every single solved case of assault-rape in the country in 2010 was carried out by a Muslim immigrant. The report was cited by an official Norwegian television station, which interviewed a victim who said that her rapist explained to her that his religion permits him to rape her. According to the police report there was a total of 186 of known rape cases in 2010. These fall into various categories, the largest one of which is assault-rape, carried out by sheer physical force, of which there were 86 cases. In 83 of these cases the perpetrator could be identified by the victim. In all 83, the attacker was described as having “non-western appearance,” a laundered euphemism for Muslim immigrants from Africa, the Middle East, or Asia.

In other categories of rape there were Norwegian attackers as well, but they were still in the minority (Note: the translation of the Norwegian TV report embedded here does not make a distiction between “assault rape” and other forms of rape, and appears to confuse the statistics for 2010 with those for 2006-2010). A female police officer who commented on the report explained that “Many of the perpetrators who commit these rapes are on the edge of society often unemployed, arriving from traumatized countries. In the past five years it has often been asylum seekers.” The problem is not new. A report in Aftenposten in 2001 said: “While 65 percent of those charged with rape are classed as coming from a non-western background, this segment makes up only 14.3 percent of Oslo’s population. Norwegian women were the victims in 80 percent of the cases.” “In other words,” says the New American, “Muslims from Africa and other benighted Third World places are targeting Western women for rape.”

It elaborates: “In 2005, the blogger Fjordman reported on a similar rape wave in Sweden. A crime prevention study that year reported that Algerians, Libyans, Moroccans, and Tunisians ‘dominate the group of rape suspects,’ he reported. The same year, the newspaper Aftonbladet reported that nearly half of all rapists were immigrants.” Yehuda Bello, an Israeli blogger who is well-acquainted with Norwegian culture, noted the report and claimed that Norwegians are a culture that suffers from “extreme boredom” due to the presence of huge oil reserves, and are thus inordinately interested in multiculturalism and assorted “human rights” campaigns. They are also traditionally anti-Semitic, he believes. As a result their politicians and press are focused on Israel’s actions in Shechem (Nablus) and Hevron and choose to ignore Muslim misdeeds — be they in Iran, Syria, or in Norway itself. Despite this, he reports, the Muslim rape campaign has become so terrible that even Norwegians have begun to recognize the reality around them, and in recent months there have been protests where the slogan was “Muslims out!”. {By Gil Ronen – www.israelnationalnews.com}

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The CIA’s Islamist Cover Up

The tenth anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington will be accompanied by the usual solemn political pronouncements and predictable media retrospectives. Pundits will point out that the West’s own economic mismanagement of the past decade has done more to weaken Europe and North America than the Islamists’ attacks. Some others will note how radical Islamists are still strong in Afghanistan and point to the recent downing of a military helicopter with dozens of US troops dead. Still others will use the anniversary to pontificate on how our concerns about Islamism have given racists an excuse to tarnish an entire religion. We will also hear about how the democratic uprisings in the Arab world—Libya being the latest—have undermined Islamists (by providing the region’s disgruntled masses with examples of positive, instead of destructive change).

All of these points are well and good and worth hearing again. But they shouldn’t distract us from a very precise and practical problem that hasn’t been addressed: the refusal of the CIA to disclose the details of its involvement with Islamist groups. In recent weeks, the agency has tried to block sections of a new book that deals with its handling of al-Qaeda before and after September 11. But this is only one part of a large-scale cover-up that Western governments have been perpetrating about decades of ties to Islamist organizations. Until we clarify our murky history with radical Islam, we won’t be able to understand the background of the September 11 attacks and whether our strategies today to engage the Muslim world are likely to succeed.

Of course some of this history is well known. The blowback story—how the US armed the mujahedeen, some of whom morphed into al-Qaeda—has been told in book and film. We are also getting a sense now of how parts of the US-backed Pakistani military-intelligence complex have actively supported radical Islamists. Collusion between Britain and Islamist movements over the past century has also been explored. And of course, Israel’s support for Hamas as a counterweight to the Palestinian Liberation Organization has gone down as one of the great diplomatic miscalculations of recent history.

But compared to the full scope of the issue, these insights are meager. To date, the Central Intelligence Agency continues to block access to its archives relating to radical Islam or cooperation with Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. In the course of researching my book on the Brotherhood’s expansion into the West, I applied numerous times under the Freedom of Information Act to see documents concerning events in the 1950s, some of which had been confirmed by already declassified State Department cables. Inevitably the CIA responded with the blanket exception of “national security” to justify denying access to any files.

Said Ramadan: Despite the CIA’s information blockade, it is clear from interviews with CIA operatives and other countries’ intelligence archives that the CIA was courting groups like the Brotherhood as allies in the US’s global battle against communism. In Egypt, the charge was often made by the government of Gamel Abdel Nasser that the Muslim Brotherhood was in the CIA’s pay. This was also a view of some Western intelligence agencies, which flatly declared that Said Ramadan, the Swiss-based son-in-law of the group’s founder, was a US agent. The agency may have—but for this we need access to its archives—colluded with Ramadan in attempting a coup against Nasser.

The CIA certainly did help the Brotherhood establish itself in Europe, helping to create the milieu that led to the September 11 attacks. The mosque in Munich that Ramadan helped found, for example, became a hotbed of anti-US activity. The man convicted as a key perpetrator of the 1993 attack against the World Trade Center had sought spiritual counseling at the mosque before leaving to carry out his attacks. And in 1998, the man believed to be al-Qaeda’s chief financial officer was arrested near the mosque and also sought spiritual counseling from the mosque’s imam. An investigation based on this arrest traced radical Islamists right to a second mosque—the al-Quds mosque in Hamburg—where three of the four 9/11 pilots worshipped, it but failed to make the final link. This isn’t to say that the CIA was behind the September 11 attacks but that US collusion with Islamists in the Cold War bore bitter fruit in later years—making it imperative that we understand exactly what happened in those seemingly distant years of the 50s, 60s and 70s of the last century.

More recently, despite Washington’s sometimes hostile public rhetoric toward to the Brotherhood, it is clear that the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama have tried to court the movement. Internal CIA analyses from 2006 and 2008, which I obtained, show that the Brotherhood was viewed as a positive force and potential ally—this time not against communism but Islamist terrorism: the Brotherhood was considered a moderate Islamist group and thus able to channel grievances away from violence toward the United States (even if Brotherhood theoreticians did not renounce violence against Israel or US soldiers). The State Department also used US Muslims close to the Brotherhood to reach out to Islamists in Europe. Such support has given these groups legitimacy in the United States and Europe.

The CIA is blocking the release of information because the subject remains sensitive—both for the West and the Muslim world. In Washington, the CIA could come under fire if its own archives would confirm and fill out the current sketch view of history. For the Brotherhood, amid its current re-emergence as a major political force in Egypt and other countries, it would be extremely damaging to know that illustrious figures in its history were working for the country that most exemplifies the decadent, imperialist forces it has struggled against for decades.

Revealing this history could be painful but necessary to strip away the doublespeak that both sides have used to describe their dealings with each other. This isn’t to say that releasing information should be used to bash cooperation with Islamists. Clearly the United States and other Western countries need to deal with groups like the Brotherhood, and perhaps in some situations even to support them: for example if the Brotherhood really were to come to power democratically in Egypt, the United States would be obliged to deal with such a government. For the Brotherhood a case could be made that in past decades, when its members were so badly repressed by authorities in the Middle East, that some sort of help from the West was necessary to avoid destruction by the authoritarian governments that persecute it.

These are legitimate arguments. But they can only be made if the full history of these relationships is made known rather than kept hidden. To do this will require action from Congress. The CIA did not release documents concerning US intelligence dealings with Nazi officials, for example, until it was forced to by the passage of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998. This piece of legislation compelled US government agencies to release all files on their dealings with the Nazis during and after the war. It lead to an incredible flood of information on the topic, helping us understand, for example, US collaboration with ex-Nazis after the war.

We need a similar law today. This is not to draw a parallel between Islamism and Nazism—an argument that is tendentious and counter-productive. The only parallel is that the US government has dealt with these questionable organizations and is so unwilling to admit this that it will take specific instructions from Congress to make these dealings public. Whatever the merits of these policies they are based on a long-standing, but still mostly secret, strategy. As Western governments seek to distinguish between “good” and “bad” Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or between the Muslim Brotherhood and more radical groups in the Middle East, understanding this strategy—and its efficacy—has never been more urgent. {Quelle: www.nybooks.com – Ian Johnson}

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Habib Adly, “bottomless pit of EVIL”

State television has disclosed a witness in the trial of Mubarak, his sons and Habib Adly has given evidence “that Habib el-Adly, the former interior minister, ordered protesters to be dispersed by any means during the 18-day uprising that led to Mubarak’s downfall in February”. In addition Essam Shawky, a lieutenant colonel testified that “El-Adly also ordered internet and the phone service be cut”. Other police officers also testified “orders were given by el-Adly for police officers to use live ammunition against protesters during the revolution.” The evidence included details of a crucial meeting on the 27th of January, the night before the big Friday protest, “where el-Adly told police officers to use any means necessary without having to consult with their superiors to confront and stop the protests.”

The evidence was reiterated by General Hassan Abdel Hameed, a former assistant to el-Adly, saying “orders to use force must have come from el-Adly himself.” The evidence confirmed and further exposed Habib Ady is “an evil callous and sinister individual acting with total disregard for human life in a desperate bid to retain the status Quo at any cost.” The Damning evidence against Former Interior Minister Habib Adly has come after numerous media reports and a recent TV interview on 28 August 2011 asserting “Adly masterminded the underhanded New years Attack outside the Al Saints Church in Alexandria killing 24 people and injuring over 100.”

The evidence exposes an evil pattern of behaviour by a ruthless individual absorbed in power, pride, greed and total indifference to the very people he was employed to protect from such abuses. There is a chronic problem when the “security apparatus” formed to protect citizens from terrorist attacks, is the same organisation masterminding and executing these evil attacks. Suffice to note Habib Adly and Mubarak were quick to publicly state “no egyptian would ever conduct such an attack, and the real culprits are the radical Islamic terrorist group Al-qaida.” Both men did not hesitate to accuse their fellow Muslims brothers of the attack. It is unclear whether Mubarak was “decieved” by Habib Adly. There is however very little doubt if any that Habib Adly engaged in “taqqiya” a lie designed to deceive.

Habib Adly demonstrated no regard for the injury this evil act would cause: to the victims, their families and the name of “Islam”. Habib Adly by all accounts is an evil man not unlike Hitler, his evil deeds have invoked the “Wrath of God almighty” and is now suffering the consequences and may well pay for his actions with his life. Based on the evidence given there is little doubt Adly will be found guilty and will be convicted to death. There will be 1000’s of people lining up begging to carry out the punishment, we are unsure if the death sentence will be effected by a bullet to the head, or a rope around his neck. Habib Adly has earned himself a one way ticket to hell, where he will meet “Satan” the evil one that led him astray during his tenure.

It is difficult to fathom how in God’s good name “do such evil lowly and worthless people attain these crucial positions of responsibility in Islamic countries with out any accountability? The evidence exposes the Islamic world is in desperate need of transformation where “satanic evil” individuals like Adly are weeded out and dealt with in the severest manner possible. I can not see such abuses ever occuring in non islamic. european or western democracies, “hence the youth revolution demandinf a secula democratic society”. I specifically recall reminding Mubarak and Adly to beware of the “Wrath of God” when the Egyptian Security force stormed and attacked worshippers in the St Mina Church in November 2010 resuting in the death of 11 people and destruction of the church. These fools did not heed that warning and look at where they are today, “they are common criminals, hated and despised” in a country where even their families will never be abe to live in peace or safety. This is one consequence of their action. Habib Adly’s wife and children willnever be safe in egypt, especially after the daiy revelations exposing his evil nature.

It is sincerely hoped that Field Marshal Tantawi will not repeat the error of these fools and likewise invoke the wrath of God. Tantawi has been summoned to give evidence in the same trial on sunday, “as to his knowledge of events and the role of the military during the mass slaughter of egyptians by the egyptian government security force, not a pretty picture. Field Marshal Tantawi you need to ensure the families off the martyrs of the All Saints Church bombing are not ignored, I make you aware this was not just an attack against Coptic Christians, “it was an attack on a Holy House of our lord and Saviour Jesus Christ”.

Field Marshal I implore you “Do NOT invoke the wrath of God,” and I remind you “vengeance is mine said the Lord”. The ball is in your court, you have the authority to ensure Justice prevails and bring those responsible to account, “do not Ignore the suffering, despair and anguish of the families of the victims and act before God almighty steps in. Learn from the failures of Mubarak and Adly.Jesus Christ sought sanctity in EGYPT, and he will never allow these attacks upon his faithfull children to go unpunished.

Written by Assad Elepty – 9 September 2011

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Hana Qaddafi: dictator’s daughter survived Reagan’s bombs?

Hana Qaddafi, we were told, was killed by US airstrikes in 1986 when she was a baby. Evidence now suggests that Muammar Qaddafi lied keeping his daughter under wraps for 25 years.

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Sudan Sharia Law oppresses women

A former member of the Muslim Brotherhood specifically warned Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC on January 9th, 2011 that the Muslim Brotherhood wants to impose Sharia law. The very next day Andrea Mitchell says that the Brotherhood is not a radical Muslim group. So it’s obvious she didn’t actually care what Ayaan Hirsi Ali had to say. Andrea Mitchell’s mind was made up and she was going to report the Muslim Brotherhood are not extremists. This backs up what I say about MSNBC being radically left wing.

Muslim Brotherhood wants Sharia Law around the world

Ayaan Hirsi Ali grew up a Muslim but eventually made her way to the Netherlands were she gradually learned a life beyond Islam through books from the western world. She has been able to escape a arranged marriage, threats on her life for a book and film she made critical of Muslim oppression. She now lives in the free land of America

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Muslim Brotherhood Impose Islam…Step by Step”

Things are looking good for Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, the grandfather of all Islamist groups. Despite the organization’s hegemonic aspirations – which include “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization … so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions” – the Obama administration recently announced that it “welcomes dialogue” with the Brotherhood; so did the European Union. And under Egypt’s military regime, the Islamist organization just “became a legal political party for the first time since President Gamal Abdel Nasser banned it more than half-a-century ago”.

Why Nasser banned the Brotherhood – and tried to decimate it – is instructive. Machiavellian from the start, Nasser collaborated closely with the Brotherhood; many Egyptians still insist he was originally a member. Soon after usurping Egypt’s leadership via the 1952 Revolution, the alliance soured, culminating with an assassination attempt on Nasser’s life by a Brotherhood member. Nasser’s response was swift and decisive: he dissolved the Brotherhood, burned down its headquarters, arrested some 15,000 members, and executed some – most famously Sayyid Qutb, the spiritual father of al-Qaeda – while leaving others to rot in prison. Many of the remaining members, aware that Nasser meant business, fled Egypt.

Why such a dramatic response? Why not simply punish the failed assassin and his accomplices? Nasser, a pious Muslim, was most likely intimately, if not instinctively, aware of what the Brotherhood was – and still – is: he was aware that it is impossible for Muslim organization’s committed to theocratic rule to negotiate or share power, much less be trustworthy allies. In short, Nasser was aware that, once the opportunity presented itself, the Brotherhood would do everything in its power to take over: unlike secular parties concerned with the temporal, it has a divine mandate – a totalitarian vision – to subdue society to Sharia. Some people even maintain that Nasser himself staged the assassination attempt as a pretext to eliminate the Brotherhood. An interpretation that only further supports the theory that Nasser knew he had to dismantle the Islamists, and was willing to play dirty to do so. Nasser’s approach, then, is the realpolitik approach of one who knows that you must suppress those who would suppress you – once circumstances permit – a long-term approach that takes the big picture into account, unlike many Western politicians who are only looking for a quick fix for the duration of their term. For its part, the Brotherhood learned the virtues of patience and perseverance; to play the game on the enemy’s terms – whether by rejecting violence; by going to the kafir [unbeliever] ballot box; by leading us to adopt the “pluralistic” language of the West – a skill Brotherhood affiliates in the West, such as CAIR, have perfected to an art. Recently, a new document on implementing Sharia on the Brotherhood’s website argues that “Gradual action does not impose Islam at once, but rather step by step”.

Consider, too, how the mere passage of time has empowered the Brotherhood in the Arab and Muslim world. Over the decades, Egyptian society has become more Islamist and more sympathetic to the Brotherhood – thanks in no small part to the organization’s grassroots efforts; Moreover, both in Egypt and abroad, many truly believe that the Muslim Brotherhood organization has reformed, which would be worthy of note if the facts corresponded to such a wish. They don’t. Many people also believed that Khomeini would bring democracy to Iran. He didn’t. What would be their fall-back position if they are wrong? The passage of time in the West has also helped the Brotherhood: Western politics have descended into idealism and fantasy – culminating today with Washington reaching out to Islamists. Would they have reached out to the Nazis? The Muslim Brotherhood is a testimony to the power of time and patience. From being crushed and disbanded half a century ago, the Brotherhood is now legal and poised to take over Egypt. When all is said and done, the Brotherhood wants the same thing all Islamists, Salafists, and Jihadists want: the enforcement of Allah’s draconian anti-infidel laws to govern the earth. They are just smarter – more patient – than their impulsive counterparts in the West.

The lesson of Nasser is that when dealing with an existential, permanent enemy, sometimes the only response is the most decisive, the ugliest – even when your enemy is weak. If he becomes stronger, it is just that much more costly in life and treasure to do anything to counter him. It would have been so much easier to stop Hitler, say, before he crossed the Rhine – but how many voices were there then insisting he was just a tin-pot dictator who would never be a serious threat to anyone? Otherwise, you play the talking game, the waiting game, as the West has done with North Korea and Iran, which grants your adversary precisely what he most needs to be in a position to attack you: Time.

{Written by Raymond Ibrahim – Hudson NY – 25 July 2011 – Foto: President Nasser (right) instinctively understood the existential threat posed by the Brotherhood and acted accordingly}. Raymond Ibrahim, a widely published author on Islam, is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum – www.raymondibrahim.com}

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“Christian Terrorism”?

Both terrorists, yes, but both inspired by religion?

In light of the Norway terrorist attack, and as expected, the hail of religious relativism has begun—the idea that, if a “Christian,” such as Breivik, commits terrorism, then it is folly to assert that certain Muslim doctrines inspire violence and terror: all becomes relative. A recent AP report titled “‘Christian terrorist’? Norway case strikes debate,” As westerners wrestle with such characterizations of the Oslo mass murder suspect, the question arises: Nearly a decade after 9/11 created a widespread suspicion of Muslims based on the actions of a fanatical few, is this what it’s like to walk a mile in the shoes of stereotype? “Absolutely,” said Mark Kelly Tyler, pastor of Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. “It clearly puts us in a position where we can’t simply say that extreme and violent behavior associated with a religious belief is somehow restricted to Muslim extremists.” “It speaks to cultural assumptions, how we are able to understand something when it (comes from) us,” Tyler said. “When one of us does something terrible, we know that’s not how we all think, yet we can’t see that with other people.” Psychologists say stereotypes come from a deeply human impulse to categorize other people, usually into groups of “us” and “them.”

The report goes on to give the opinions of an array of sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists, who regurgitate the same aforementioned themes on “a fanatical few,” “extreme and violent behavior,” “cultural assumptions,” and “stereotypes.” Yet not once do any of these soft-scientists bother investigating, let alone pointing out, what Christianity and Islam actually teach regarding violence. Nor do they seem cognizant that there is a major difference between what people do in the name of religion and what the religion itself commands — just as there is a major difference between historical descriptions of war in the Bible and timeless prescriptions to wage war in the Koran (see “Are Judaism and Christianity as Violent as Islam?” for a full treatment of these issues). Nor are these important differences limited to theory, but rather manifest themselves in reality: when jihadists attack in the name of Islam, such as on 9/11, high-ranking Muslim clerics praise them and Muslims celebrate in the streets; conversely, no Christian preacher has praised Breivik’s terrorism, nor are Christians dancing.

The report continues: “Breivik is not a Christian. That’s impossible. No one believing in Jesus commits mass murder,” Bill O’Reilly said on his Fox News show. That makes sense to Joyce Dubensky, CEO of the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding. She said it also makes sense that “millions of Muslims say Osama bin Laden is not a Muslim, that no one who believes in the prophet Muhammad commits mass murder.” Note again how the stress is entirely on what people “believe” and “say”—not what Christian and Muslim doctrines so unequivocally teach. Worse, that “millions of Muslims say Osama bin Laden is not a Muslim” is a curious assertion, considering that the Obama administration saw that the arch-terrorist was given an Islamic burial so as not to anger the Muslim world (jihadists who go down in sea receive double the brownie points that land-dying jihadists receive—which are already considerable, a la 72 celestial concubines, etc.).

The one rare mention in the report of actual teachings comes from another psychology professor: “If you’re a Christian and you see this Norway murderer, you say, I have these teachings and I haven’t murdered anyone, so the teachings can’t be the problem. But if you’re talking about the ‘other,’ it’s different. And if you don’t know what the actual Muslim teachings are, it seems like a plausible explanation.” Quite the contrary, if you know what Islam teaches concerning the jihad and the non-Muslim—tellingly known as the “infidel”—violence becomes a very “plausible explanation.”

If lamentable, none of this is surprising: because Western secularists cannot fathom the importance of doctrine to believers; cannot take religion seriously—seeing all scriptures as little better than poetry to be interpreted any which way—they project their indecisive worldview onto the decisive “other,” much, ironically, to secularism’s own detriment. {Written by Raymond Ibrahim – Jihad Watch – 3rd August 2011}

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Amazing video…enjoy exercise daily:

Run from the Devil and walk with the Lord!

This is one of the most beautiful and meaningful streaming videos ever created. Be sure your speakers are on. This is published by the BBC!!

Can you imagine NBC, CBS or ABC doing this?

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Lawyer Accuses Egyptian Military Council of Burying Church Bombing Case

Joseph Malak, lawyer for the Two Saints Church in Alexandria, accused the military council of ignoring the church bombing case. The bombing occurred on New Year’s Eve in in front of the church, and claimed the lives of 25 Copts and injured over 100 others who were attending midnight mass. Malak, who is lead lawyer for the case, said the Coptic Church intends to file a lawsuit against the President of the Council of Ministers, the Interior Minister, and the Attorney General, to compel them to re-open the investigation into the bombing, pointing out that a large number of affidavits, with the participation of a number of families of the victims, have been sent to the attorney general and the military council, without any reply.

Malak made these statements at a conference held by the Egyptian Center for Development Studies and Human Rights on Sunday July 24 at the Church of St. Mark in Alexandria. The conference was attended by the media, Alexandria priests, members of the Coptic Confessional Council in Alexandria and family members of the victims. “We will demand the Attorney General to take determined action to complete the investigation into the case and to speed up detection of the perpetrators and bring them to trial,” Malak said, explaining this would include questioning former Interior Minister, Habib al-Adli, and the disclosure of the reasons for the release of the suspects who were arrested after the bombing.

He added that the lawsuit will also ask for the cancellation of the prohibition of publication of the bombing incident imposed by the attorney general in January, which is still in effect, besides obliging the Ministers of Interior and Justice to complete investigations and sentencing as soon as possible. Father Makkar Fawzi, Pastor of the Two Saints Church, asked the media to press the issue, saying “You are our last resort, we have talked with many officials without any answer.” He added the State is fully responsible to search for the culprits and the issue should not be ignored. Reverend Abraham Emil, Deputy Pontifical for Alexandria and the priest of the Church of St. Mark, said the security and intelligence services are able to find the offenders, rejecting the continued silence about the case, and called for the need to give the injured and the families of the victims their rights as Egyptians, and the state to be held responsible for the care of their families financially and socially. “They have same rights as victims of the Revolution,” he added.

Mr. Camil Saddik, Secretary of the Coptic Confessional Council in Alexandria, said it was not acceptable for the State to abandon the rights of the Copts killed during worship at church, stressing that their demands for revealing the real perpetrators is the least the victims deserve, describing the way the government is evading its responsibilities as a “stigma.” He speculated on whether they was a connection between the bombing of the Two Saints Church and the threats issued to the Coptic Church eight hours before, demanding the release of detainees held by the Church. “Saddik is voicing what the majority of Copts believe — that the Salafists in collaboration with State Security carried out the bombings of the Alexandria Church,” said Coptic activist Edward Fahmy.

Tamer Salah al-Din, one of the organizers of the conference, accused the Egyptian State Security of complicity in the bombing and spoke of their role in causing sedentary strife between Muslims and Christians. He added that suspicions about the involvement of the State Security have risen after revelations that officers and security personnel who were assigned to protect the church at the time were not at their posts at the time of the bombing (AINA 1-2-2011). Written by Mary Abdelmassih – www.copts.co.uk}

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FUTURE OF CHRISTIANS IN EGYPT

Commission on Security and Coop. in Europe The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, also known as the U.S. Helsinki Commission, held a hearing

Egyptian Christians abused and tormented by Muslims: U.S. lawmaker

U.S. Rep. Chris Smith:”The Egyptian government has failed to initiate credible investigation into the cases of the abducted women, and that does have perhaps the intended consequence of creating a climate of impunity for the perpetrators. If there is no penalty for this terrible abuse and violence, it only encourages more violence.” Although President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other members of the Obama Administration — through their rhetoric and actions — treat the Egyptian revolution as a positive movement, there is nothing mentioned by them or their supporters about the treatment of Christians at the hands of the Muslim population and government. Dr. Michele Clark testified on Capitol Hill on Friday about the continued abuse of Coptic females in Egypt, a nation struggling to come together in the aftermath of this Spring’s Arab revolution.

The U.S. Helsinki Commission, formally known as The U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, held Friday’s hearing to examine the recent escalation of violence toward Coptic Christians in Egypt, as well as reports of disappearances, forced conversions and forced marriages of Coptic women and girls. Clark, who also serves as an adjunct professor at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, told the Commission that there is no denying these reports. “These reports are not allegations nor should they be disputed,” Clark said. “Coptic women disappear. Coptic women are forcibly converted, or converted under false pretenses, and Coptic women are forcibly married to Muslim men.”

In 2009, Clark was asked by Christian Solidarity International and The Coptic Foundation for Human Rights to investigate the issue. Together, Clark and Coptic women’s rights advocate Nadia Ghlay released a 42-page report that detailed dozens of cases of abuse against Coptic Christians in Egypt. The Commission’s Chairman, Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), said that lawmakers must focus their efforts on curbing the abuse of Coptic women in Egypt. “The Egyptian Government has failed to initiate credible investigation into the cases of the abducted women, and that does have perhaps the intended consequence of creating a climate of impunity for the perpetrators,” he said. “If there is no penalty for this terrible abuse and violence, it only encourages more violence.”

Smith is the original sponsor of “The Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000,” which provided U.S. officials with more tools to crack down on nations that are complicit in allowing the selling or trafficking of women to occur. Christian Solidarity InternationaI-USA President and CEO Dr. John Eibner called the report’s findings “deeply disturbing,” and said that they “should challenge human rights activists and institutions…to undertake, as a matter of urgency, further research into this form of gender and religious based violence against Coptic women and girls in Egypt.” During her testimony, Dr. Clark highlighted the discoveries of her report to members of the Commission.

Among her key findings:

- Coptic Christian women and girls are deceptively lured into forced marriages with Muslim men and subsequently converted to Islam.

- The criminality of alleged forced marriages and conversions is generally dismissed by the authorities. Young women are presumed to be willing participants.

- Counseling sessions with members of their own clergy, traditionally part of the conversion process to Islam, are no longer available to potential converts to Islam.

- Coptic women experience physical and psychological abuse both before and after their conversions and marriages.

- Coptic women and girls are vulnerable to deception and fraudulent practices because of difficult home environments, economic pressures and sheltered lives.

Clark called on members of the Commission to implement the following trio of recommendations:

1. The reinstatement counseling sessions for those contemplating conversion to Islam by the Government of Egypt.

2. The restoration of Christian identity cards to former converts to Islam who decide to return to their original faith by the Government of Egypt.

3. The investigation of all allegations of kidnapping, rape and other acts of violence against women associated with forced marriages and conversion of Coptic women by the Government of Egypt. {Written by Jim Kouri – www.copts.co.uk}

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United We Stand: First Transatlantic Anti-Islamization Conference Coming to France July 2

The human rights organizations Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) and Stop Islamisation of Europe (SIOE) will hold their first-ever transatlantic summit in Strasbourg, France, on July 2. SIOA and SIOE are the foremost organizations in America and Europe that are dedicated to defending human rights, religious liberty, and the freedom of speech against Islamic supremacist intimidation and attempts to bring elements of Sharia to the West.

It will mark the European premiere of the acclaimed SIOA documentary on the Ground Zero mosque controversy, The Ground Zero Mosque: Second Wave of the 9/11 Attacks. The documentary features speakers such as Dutch freedom fighter Geert Wilders, former Ambassador John Bolton, Sudanese ex-slave Simon Deng, and many 9/11 family members and first responders. It also features brand-new interviews with Geller and SIOA associate director Robert Spencer. As many similar mosque initiatives are being pursued in Europe, this film has a particular urgency for Europe as well as America.

The confirmed list of speakers at the summit includes Pamela Geller, the popular blogger and columnist who publishes the acclaimed AtlasShrugs.com blog and is the author of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and the soon to be released Stop the Islamization of America, A Practical Guide to the Resistance; Robert Spencer, a bestselling author and internationally renowned Islamic expert; the noted activist SIOE Director Anders Gravers; Roberta Moore of the Jewish Division — EDL; Conny Meier of the German human rights group Pax Europa; frontrunning Bulgarian presidential candidate Pavel Chernev; and others to be announced soon.

The SIOA/SIOE summit will establish a common American/European coalition of free people who are determined to stand for freedom and oppose the advance of Islamic law, Sharia, which is not simply a religious system, but a political system that encompasses every aspect of life; is authoritarian, discriminatory, and repressive; and contradicts Western laws and principles in numerous particulars.

The SIOA/SIOE Strasbourg summit will begin at 1PM with a demonstration at Place de la République, followed by a conference at FEC 17 rue Saint Etienne at 3PM.

We are a coalition of free people who are determined to stand for the Constitutional principles upon which the United States is based. We recognize that Islamic law, Sharia, is not simply a religious system, but a political system that encompasses every aspect of life; is authoritarian, discriminatory, and repressive; and contradicts U.S. law in numerous particulars. In defense of freedom, therefore, we oppose the advancement of Sharia in all its manifestations in this country, including:

•The use of Sharia to decide cases in American courts, which use generally victimizes the women involved in such cases;
•The adoption of the provisions Sharia finance by American financial institutions, which involves the restriction of entire sectors of the U.S. economy, and allows Islamic supremacists dangerous access to our financial apparatus;
•The accommodation of Sharia provisions in American workplaces, schools, and government institutions, which is generally intended to establish Muslims as a special class with special rights and privileges that non-Muslims do not enjoy (exactly as Sharia envisions);
•The construction of mega-mosques designed to assert Islamic supremacy, and that will be devoted to the teaching of Sharia principles in American neighborhoods;
•The relaxation of proper and justifiable scrutiny of the American Muslim community for terrorist and seditious activity out of fear of offending Muslims;
•The brutalization and murder of women in the U.S. in Islamic honor killings that are subsequently covered up or lightly punished by authorities anxious not to offend the Muslim community;
•The media bias that focuses on a non-existent anti-Muslim “backlash” after every jihad plot in the U.S., instead of on the reality of jihad activity in U.S. mosques, and that ignores or minimizes the jihadist ties of putatively “moderate” U.S. Muslim organizations;
•The continuing media demonization of anti-jihad activists, in accord with Sharia provisions forbidding criticism of Islam;
•Any and all other manifestations of the Islamization of America.
We stand for:

•The freedom of speech – as opposed to Islamic prohibitions of “blasphemy” and “slander,” which are used effectively to quash honest discussion of jihad and Islamic supremacism;
•The freedom of conscience – as opposed to the Islamic death penalty for apostasy;
•The equality of rights of all people before the law – as opposed to Sharia’s institutionalized discrimination against women and non-Muslims.
We call upon all elected officials and law enforcement authorities to take all necessary actions to defend the Constitutional freedoms they have been entrusted with preserving and protecting.

We insist that they apply existing sedition laws to any and all individuals and groups that are advocating adoption in the U.S. of any Sharia provision contradicting U.S. law. We call upon the mainstream media to report on Islamic supremacist activity, and the resistance to that activity, fairly, fully, and accurately. We call upon all free people of all races and creeds to stand with us to defend our freedoms against this radically intolerant ideology. In this effort, we pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. {www.sioaonline.com}

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A Bloody Christian Spring

The press is full of glowing reports of the so-called Arab Spring sweeping through the Middle East. Chanting protesters demanding “democracy” are seen confronting brutal police force. It is a narrative that is accepted without question by so many in the West who want to believe a transformation is taking place. Western governments are quick to offer aid. In Libya, there is military intervention to safeguard the lives of innocent civilians. While the Moslem world seems ready to embrace democracy, there are disturbing signs this particular brand of democracy is spelt with an “s” as in shariah law. Organized radical Islamist groups like the Moslem Brotherhood are jockeying into position to ensure theirs is the dominant one. However, one disconcerting aspect of the “democratic” Arab Spring is that the very people who complain of oppression are now themselves oppressing and killing Christians. Indeed this May has proven to be part of a very bloody Christian Spring – and no one seems to be upset about it.

Among recent attacks, one reads of an angry mob of Muslims who threw rocks and firebombs at Christians gathered in Cairo to petition the new regime to reopen nearly 50 churches it shuttered. More than 65 were injured. On May 8, attackers stormed and set ablaze the Virgin Mary Church in Cairo, shouting: “With our blood and soul, we will defend you, Islam.” Twelve people were killed in these attacks and 232 wounded. These and other attacks have all taken place while Egyptian police and troops have done little or nothing to stop the violence which is quickly becoming systemic.

And the the persecution is not limited to Egypt. In Tunisia shortly after former President Zine Abeddine Ben Ali’s fall, Father Marek Rybinski, a Poland-born Catholic priest, was murdered on the premises of an inter-denominational school in the Tunis suburban governorate of Manouba. All over the Middle East, the rumblings of revolts heighten the prospects of more repeats of such violence. Many Christians in the region are considering leaving because they fear radical Islamists have hijacked the uprisings. Syrian Christians say ‘Arab Spring’ changes could hasten their own extinction. Alas, it seems that it is open season on persecuting Christians not just in the Middle East but all over the world. Persecution of Catholics is happening in Nigeria, Ivory Coast, North Korea, Zimbabwe and many other places. According to a March report of the Human Rights Watch (HRW), Christians in Vietnam increasingly face charges of national security crimes, severe abuse, property confiscation and forced renunciations of faith.

In early May, there were at least 49 dead, hundreds injured and an unspecified number of arrests in a wave of bloody repression unleashed by the security forces against the worshipers which included several Catholic groups in the Hmong community, an ethnic minority that lives in the northwest of the country and in Laos. In April, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) released its annual report, which flagged several incidents of horrific abuses of Christians in China—including “disappearances,” beatings, the destruction of churches, and forced “re-education through labor.” The same report also noted that China has found subtle ways of undercutting religious authority, creating divisions and quietly preempting the spread of free religious worship. Indeed, the commission’s report notes that “Chinese officials are increasingly adept at employing the language of human rights and the rule of law to defend repression of religious communities.” While so many media support the “Arab Spring,” violence against Christians does not seem to move them to action. There is little outcry to defend Christians against bloodshed. There are no military interventions put in place to save persecuted Catholics. No one mentions the reality of today’s Bloody Christian Spring. {Written by John Horvat II}

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Muslim Brotherhood opens new headquarters in Egypt after 60 years

The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has opened its new headquarters in Cairo after 60 years of being banned, in a ceremony attended by officials from a Turkish Islamist party. Felicity Party, or SP, deputy leader Hasan Bitmez and board member Oğuzhan Asiltürk were among the political figures from Egypt, Jordan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Somalia and Turkey that attended the opening ceremony in the Moqattam area along with Egyptian intellectuals. “For 60 years we were considered an illegal group, we were raided and arrested by the police all the time, but now we have our headquarters legally and we even put the logo of the Muslim Brotherhood onto the chairs,” one of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, Dr. Ashraf Abdel Ghaffar, told the Hürriyet Daily News on Sunday.

Bitmez said the Muslim Brotherhood will play an important role in the future of Egypt, the Anatolia news agency reported. His colleague Asiltürk said it was very good that the Muslim Brotherhood now has a headquarters in Cairo after such a long time. The chairman of the Muslim Brotherhood, Dr. Mohamed Badie, who presided over the opening of the headquarters, said the group’s aim was “to have a civilian government with a reference to Islam.”

Dr. Abdel Ghaffar said the Muslim Brotherhood now had offices in 26 cities and aimed to have one in every city in Egypt. Founded by the schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna in the Suez Canal town of Ismailia in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood was one of the first and most successful movements advocating Islam as a political program in a modern context. Within 20 years the movement grew to more than 500,000 members, with several branch movements in other Arab countries. The Egyptian government banned the Brotherhood in 1954 after accusing it of trying to assassinate President Gamal Abdel Nasser, a charge the group has always denied. The movement had been using an apartment as its “communication center” until former Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak was toppled in January. {www.hurriyetdailynews.com – Sunday, May 22, 2011 – ISTANBUL – Daily News with wires}

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UNDERSTANDING THE CAMILIA CRISIS

One of the Islamist thugs (Sheikh Abu Anas Ashraf ibn Yousef) who was caught on video on 7 May 2011, the day the Islamists attacked the churches in Imbaba, burned two, and killed several Copts. He appeared on video inciting hatred and violence against Copts. He himself was one of the ringleaders of that attack, which they announced was to “free Camilia”. Watch him in the video spreading his poison: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBRCgtz0Ofk&feature=share

WHAT IS THE CAMILIA CRISIS? It is nothing short of Islamist thuggish behaviour – they are known for it; their ideology prepares them for it; and they are best suited for it. Camilia is a simple, private Coptic Christian who suddenly found herself in the public, and a rallying symbol for all bullying, intimidation and terrorism by the Islamists of Egypt. She had always been Christian; never converted to Islam; never reconverted to Christianity – that was clear, and evident; but how can you convince the thuggish Islamists. They created a lie; designed it; manufactured it – that Camilia converted to Islam from Christianity; that she was prevented from that; that she was detained by the Church; that the Copts were forcibly brainwashing her. So they call her, “Our sister”, and set themselves to “free her”. They pretend to defend Islam, the right to convert; nay, human rights and religious liberty in one go – the sons of vipers and wolves in sheep’s clothing! Since when have the Islamists known, respected or worked for these precepts? And when has political Islam supported religious freedom, or given people free choice to chose their religion without pressure? Don’t they follow the injunction of their sacred books, “Whoever changes his/her religion (Islam), kill him/her”?

It is all farcical; and the Islamists are known for the number of their criminal farces and pathological lies. Has it not been so serious, one would have laughed from the audacity. No one should be under any illusion as to the objective behind the creation of such a lie. It was manufactured not just to intimidate Camilia, her family, her Church and her Coptic fellow-Christians in Egypt – it was meant in the last analysis to intimidate Egypt, and impose the Islamist, Wahabist ideology on its society and polity. As I have already said – the Camilia crisis is an exercise and training in bullying, intimidation and terrorising of all Egypt into submission. And only thus should it be understood by clever people world-wide. And that must be resisted by all means by all!

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Muhanimals planting supremacism in their childrens head and heart

That’s how muhanimals manipulate

their children and tell them how muhanimals are better than infidels: “Another brother took a group of children and did a small play with them. He put them into a group and told two children that they were the Muslims in the class and that there were fasting. Then he gave all the other children a sweet which they opened and started eating. The children who were fasting must have found it difficult to see all the other children eating sweets. They knew that their reward from Allah will be much greater because they have followed his command to fast the month of Ramadan. Afterwards the children who had fasted receive a large bag of sweets to symbolise the reward they will receive from Allah on the Day of Judgment.” Found here:http://www.hausdesislam.de/95-0-Eid-ul-Fitr-at-Haus-des-Islam.html

Eid-ul-Fitr at Haus des Islam

Assalamualikum Brothers and Sisters,
Bismillah
Even though I had lived in Frankfurt am Main for eleven years I had never made it to the Haus des Islams. I actually reverted to Islam in Frankfurt 10 years ago coming from an Irish Catholic background. I moved with my family to Hamburg four years ago and this EID we decided to visit old friends and family in the Frankfurt region. I was very happy to know that the EID prayer was due to start at 10 am giving us time to get ourselves and the children ready. It was a beautiful sunny morning and while we were in the car we recited – Allahu Akbar, wa lilahi elhamd. We drove through the countryside and eventually arrived at HDI. I was happy to see that all the worshipers were in one large room with the men at the front and the women at the back. I think that EID is a family day and it is great that the children can run from their father to their mothers and that we are all together. The atmosphere in the room was wonderful. Many men were reciting Allahu Akbar x 3, wa lilahil ehamd, most people had put on their best clothes and children were looking very smart.

For those who had not paid their Sakat-ul-Fitr, a box was sent around for them to do so. We were informed that it was a minimum of EUR 6 per person. I was delighted to see that a brother started taking out prayer mats into the garden for the EID prayer. It is the first time I have ever prayed the EID prayer outside – which is preferred according to the sunnah. When the EID prayer was over brother Nadir held a Khutbah. I really enjoyed it because it was clear to hear and everyone was paying attention. He spoke about our responsibility we have as Muslims towards the eduction of our children, our responsibility to our neighbours – Muslims and non Muslims. He told us to integrate positively into the society. We should follow organisations who are doing good for the society. We should be known as Muslims by our good characters. He thanked Allah that we all could profit from the month of Ramadan. We left what was Haram. He explained that what was Haram yesterday on the last day of Ramadan was now Halal on the fist day of EID. We are following Allahs orders by eating on the day of EID and celebrating with our friends and family. If we take one road to the mosque on that day we should take another one back so that we can greet as many as possible following the example of the prophet Mohammed (Peace be upon him). We took our friends in our arms and wished them EID MUBARAK.

After the Khutbah was finished we were all invited to eat breakfast together in the yard of HDI. It was well orgnaised and soon the tables were laden with food. One brother who reverted to Islam seven weeks ago (alhamdulela) had set up a train set for the children to play with. Thank you for your initiative brother! The children will remember this day. Another brother took a group of children and did a small play with them. He put them into a group and told two children that they were the Muslims in the class and that there were fasting. Then he gave all the other children a sweet which they opened and started eating. The children who were fasting must have found it difficult to see all the other children eating sweets. They knew that their reward from Allah will be much greater because they have followed his command to fast the month of Ramadan. Afterwards the children who had fasted receive a large bag of sweets to symbolise the reward they will receive from Allah on the Day of Judgment.

Alhamdulela, the weather was so beautiful which made the day very special. I had the chance to meet old friends from the Frankfurt region, to celebrate the EID day and I really enjoyed my first visit to HDI.

Assalamualikum, Schwester Maeve, Hamburg, September 2009

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USCIRF Calls for Justice after Deadly Religious Violence in Egypt

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

WASHINGTON, DC: In response to deadly religious violence in Egypt over the weekend, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) is calling on the Egyptian government to conduct a thorough investigation to ensure that the perpetrators of the violence are brought to justice in civilian, not military, courts, something that has been elusive in Egypt in previous attacks on religious minorities which continues to foster an atmosphere of impunity. At least 12 Christians and Muslims were killed and more than 200 people were wounded as Islamist extremists attacked Christians at the St. Mina Church in the Imbaba district of Cairo. Another church, the Church of the Virgin Mary, was burned to the ground by extremists and several Christian-owned shops were vandalized and looted.

“The Egyptian government has failed to protect religious minorities from violent attacks, particularly Coptic Orthodox Christians, including during the post-Mubarak transitional period when minority communities have proven to be increasingly vulnerable. This fact, when combined with the ongoing climate of impunity in Egypt, explains why USCIRF recommended last month, for the first time, that Egypt should be designated a country of particular concern, or CPC, for engaging in and tolerating religious freedom violations.” said Leonard Leo, USCIRF chair. This past weekend, rumors spread that a Coptic Christian woman, who allegedly had converted to Islam in 2010, had disappeared and was being held against her will at the St. Mina Church. Such claims often trigger tensions between Muslims and Christians, just as the veracity of such rumors often have been disputed. In this case, Egyptian police reportedly confirmed yesterday that such rumors were untrue.

“It appears that Islamist extremists used the rumor as a pretext to attack Coptic Christians and their places of worship,” said Mr. Leo. “USCIRF noted in its annual report late last month that Islamist militants have used a decrease in police and security presence since former President Mubarak stepped down on February 11 to target religious minorities, particularly Coptic Orthodox Christians, the largest religious minority in Egypt. This has alarmed not only the minority Coptic Christian community but also those in civil society who see these actions as threatening to the ongoing political transition in Egypt. The Egyptian government must not permit extremists from intimidating, harassing, or committing violent acts against any Egyptian,” said Mr. Leo.

Egyptian authorities reportedly detained 190 people in connection with the violence and have vowed to conduct military trials to bring perpetrators to justice. The Supreme Council of Armed Forces reportedly has said it will increase security at places of worship and activate laws dealing with terrorism to give police and security more power to prevent further violence. Religious freedom conditions in Egypt have deteriorated under the Mubarak regime over the past several years, particularly for religious minorities. Since February 11, conditions have not improved and attacks targeting religious minorities have continued. Attacks on minorities, particularly Coptic Christians, including by Islamist militants imposing extra-judicial punishments, have risen and have resulted in several deaths and injuries. Sufi Muslims also have experienced increased attacks on mosques and shrines by Islamist militant groups since February 11.

“As a consequence of CPC designation, USCIRF recommends that the U.S. government should direct a portion of its existing $1.3 billion in military aid toward heightened security for religious minority communities and their places of worship, particularly Coptic Orthodox Christians, Sufi Muslims, and Jews,” said Mr. Leo. In addition, USCIRF recommends that the Egyptian government should:
establish a special unit in the Office of the Public Prosecutor dedicated to investigating acts of violence against Egyptian citizens on the basis of religion or belief, particularly Coptic Orthodox Christians, vigorously prosecuting and bringing to justice perpetrators, and ensuring compensation for victims;
ensure that de facto responsibility for religious affairs does not fall under the jurisdiction of the new domestic security agency, with the exception of espionage cases or cases involving violence or the advocacy of violence, including conspiracy to commit acts of terror;
= pass a unified law that would subject all places of worship to the same transparent, non-discriminatory, and efficient regulations regarding construction and maintenance;
= discontinue the use of reconciliation sessions as a bypass for punishing perpetrators, commensurate with the gravity of the crime and in accordance with the rule of law; and address incitement to imminent violence and discrimination against disfavored Muslims and non-Muslims by:
+ prosecuting in regular criminal courts government-funded clerics, government officials, or individuals who incite violence against Muslim minority communities or individual members of non-Muslim religious minority communities; and
+ disciplining or dismissing government-funded clerics who espouse intolerance.

USCIRF is an independent, bipartisan U.S. federal government commission. USCIRF Commissioners are appointed by the President and the leadership of both political parties in the Senate and the House of Representatives. USCIRF’s principal responsibilities are to review the facts and circumstances of violations of religious freedom internationally and to make policy recommendations to the President, the Secretary of State and Congress. To interview a USCIRF Commissioner, contact Tom Carter, Communications Director at tcarter@uscirf.gov This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view itThis e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or (202) 523-3257.

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Allah is Dead

Allah Is Dead: Why Islam is Not a Religion by Rebecca Bynum

Readers who pick up Rebecca Bynum’s provocatively titled new book will certainly expect to find there an unflinching critique of Islam, and in this respect, Allah is Dead does not disappoint. Those who are familiar with Ms. Bynum’s work through the web journal New English Review (where she serves as both Senior Editor and one of the leading writers) know her to be one of the most intelligent and fair-minded augurs regarding the portentous spread of Islam throughout the west, and that cautionary skill is fully demonstrated in her book. But Allah is Dead offers far more than the usual warnings about the dangers of Islamic doctrine, for what Ms. Bynum recognizes, and what she carefully explains to her readers, is that the impotence of western societies to resist the invasion of this foreign ideology is a consequence of their own pathologies. The greater portion of her book is devoted to addressing those pathologies, and applying the appropriate intellectual remedies; in the course of doing so, she offers a truly unique interpretation of the causes of western demoralization, and one which will undoubtedly challenge the comfortable assumptions of many of her readers.

Ms. Bynum lays out her case against Islam most forcefully in the first two chapters; her belief is that it is essentially an overly formalistic creed, which reduces the good life to conformity with a series of unquestionable dictates. Obedience, and not love, is its primary value. Man exists for the sake of Islam, and not Islam for the sake of man. It is fixated on the material world, and leads its adherents to similarly fixate on that same realm; the consequences of this fixation are at once a spiritual stagnation and the lust for territorial expansion: “the focus of Islam is entirely upon the material world. Its notions of pure and impure are expressly material as is its concept of religious sovereignty. Islamic sovereignty is territorial sovereignty, not the sovereignty of the spirit over the hearts of men.” In brief, Islam impinges upon the dignity of the individual, and asks its devotees to forfeit their intellectual and moral freedom, in ways that are perfectly unacceptable to western peoples, and thoroughly inconsistent with their cultures.

This is the point in the argument where we have come to expect appeals to our post-Enlightenment, secular values, perhaps spiced with some infantile railing against religion per se, as emanates, for instance, from that kindergarten of theological commentary known as the New Atheism. Much to her credit though, Ms. Bynum never peddles this modish yet facile line. To the contrary, she carefully explains how secularism has deracinated the very vocabulary which we need to confront Islam in an ideological struggle. To say, for instance, that Islam threatens human liberty requires us to possess a sensible definition of liberty. However, in the modern west, the word has become so debased that it is used synonymously with any spontaneous motion of the will; to get what you want is to exercise your liberty. And this makes it all too easy for the Islamist propagandist to dismiss western liberty as mere libertinism. But this was never how liberty was understood before the advent of secularism; as Ms. Bynum notes, liberty used to be understood in the light of an essentialist metaphysics, as the ability of a natural thing to fulfill, or perfect, its nature: “we witness in living things a seeking after an ever more perfect expression. Plants, for example, are constantly moving and jockeying for a more perfect position in relation to light above and water beneath. There seems to be inherent in life a yearning, not simply to be, but to become, and to become ‘more perfect.'” It is this kind of liberty which is worth fighting for, and which we must oppose to the doctrinal strictures of Islam. But such a notion of liberty, of a nature free to perfect itself, can only be grounded in a recognition of “a universe containing moral law,” that is to say, in a pre-Enlightenment cosmology.

Similarly, Ms. Bynum rejects the fundamental liberal tenet (or, more properly, the fundamental liberal attitude) of ideological neutrality, that tenet which reaches its apotheosis in the contemporary cult of multiculturalism. She is at pains to emphasize that we have a positive duty to weigh and choose which creeds ought to be tolerated in a civil society, and which should not: “a man’s belief, that is, his fundamental view of reality, determines his attitude toward and reaction to the world of reality and to other human beings. Thus belief systems must be of utmost concern if one cares about the destiny of humanity.”

Nor should we ever mistake the nature of tolerance to such an extent that we exalt its importance above all else: “There are things that our society cannot tolerate and expect to survive. Justice must take its rightful place above tolerance.” What Ms. Bynum understands so well is that Islam is a narrative of final reference. It cannot be met in the polemical arena by pleas for ideological neutrality, since that is ultimately a nihilistic appeal — literally, an appeal to nothingness: “one cannot effectively counter the God of Fear with the God of Nothing.” Islam, if it is to be checked at all, must be checked by another narrative of final reference.

Unfortunately, the narrative routinely on offer these days from the western “intelligentsia” is the materialist, Darwinian one, according to which man is but one more branch hanging off the phylogenetic tree, whose every last trait — no matter how apparently distinctive — can finally be explained in terms of the brute, mechanistic causality of evolutionary history. On this scheme of things, free will is an illusion of our genes, notions of human dignity but the remnants of a recalcitrant anthropomorphism. If the tenor of these claims sounds familiar, that is because they match the essential philosophical purport of Islamic belief: It is because science has progressively diminished man in his own eyes that philosophy has been stunted. We stand dumb in the face of confident Islamic assertions because we long ago abandoned the search for an effective and modern philosophical response to materialism. Islam is, in essence, an extremely materialistic religion, with many similarities to secular materialism: both remove human dignity and envision man as a slave.

It is ridiculous to suppose that we can offer a robust defense of human freedom if we all believe, like Richard Dawkins, that human beings are “robot machines.” It is absurd to think that we can stand up vigorously for human dignity if we are convinced, like Steven Pinker, that the very concept of dignity is a useless relic of a long obsolete cosmology. It is the height of folly to suppose that contemporary Darwinian materialism offers us any rational grip in the ideological tug-of-war which we must now contest with Islam, when it effectively pushes the same ugly theory of human nature as the adversarial creed. Yet it is obviously true that materialism is one of the enduring legacies of modern secularism. So Ms. Bynum has very effectively punctured the complacent self-regard of the typical modern liberal, wedded to his post-Enlightenment values, and convinced that the cure to our age’s ills is simply to persuade more people to think just as he does.

In contrast, Ms. Bynum offers the unabashed, and highly unfashionable, thesis that the proper answer to the challenge of Islam lies in the west’s return to religion: “When we contemplate how our rapidly decaying culture might be revitalized, the obvious solution is through religion, the ultimate basis of culture and the source of cultural nourishment.” Yet such a revival of religion should not be uncritical; Ms. Bynum makes it clear that there is much in the religious traditions of the west which needs to be rejected as well. Her book concludes with a chapter delineating the reasons why Islam should not qualify as a religion: it fails to nurture the individual or promote social harmony, among other things. But one can surmise that Ms. Bynum’s intentions pass beyond proposing a policy for wrestling with the advance of Islamic doctrine; what she is doing also is reminding us of what religion has been at its best, a means for enlarging the moral imagination, and an unrivaled vehicle for human exaltation and improvement. In very large part, we become what we believe: “Religion answers the primal question, what is the nature of reality? Do we inhabit a benevolent universe, a malevolent universe, or an indifferent universe? These are not trivial questions and their answers determine the basis of all human interaction.” Because we in the west have been neglectful of our own religious traditions for so long, we have mistakenly assumed that religion itself is something unimportant. But it is not so; religion is the only important thing, and the future belongs to whatever creed offers mankind the most compelling and edifying picture of the reality that he inhabits.

Rapist of 17 girls blames it on the ‘devil’ – Man who violated teens allegedly lured his victims to his house

A man who raped 17 girls in Saudi Arabia, including a 13-year-old teenager, told the police he had committed such crimes on the devil’s orders. The unnamed man, a school employee, had used his religious treatment and dream interpretation skills to seduce the girls to his house, where he “had sex with them and tore their virginity,” Anbakuk newspaper said on Thursday. In a report from the capital Riyadh, it said one of the victims was a Saudi 13-year-old girl, who later begged him to “heal her virginity”. “Police also found texts and phone numbers of many other women in his mobile phone…the victims included Arab and Indonesian girls,” it said. “The man told the court in Riyadh that he had been seduced and commanded by the devil to commit such acts…the court will soon sentence him”.

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Is Obama starting to prod Egypt on human rights?

Many human rights and democracy activists in the Middle East are disillusioned with Obama’s lack of action. But Egypt’s acceptance today of 21 human rights recommendations after a visit by Vice President Biden may signal a shift. Egypt presented a rosy picture of its human rights credentials today, promising to implement most of the recommendations made by the UN Human Rights Council as part of a quadrennial review process.

Egypt, which had accepted 119 of the council’s 165 recommendations in February, agreed to another 21 after Vice President Joe Biden had publicly urged it to implement the recommendations on a visit here earlier this week. They included those calling for better treatment of religious minorities, changes in its penal code to bring it into line with the UN Convention against Torture, and the establishment of a fully independent electoral commission.

Human rights organizations are not hopeful that Egypt will live up to the commitments it made to the council, and pointed out that

the regime has already violated the promises it made in February. But Egypt’s move comes after the US has begun to show a slight shift in policy by nudging Egypt on human rights and reform. “Biden could have easily gone to Egypt and spoken only about Gaza and Iran. I think it’s notable that he raised those issues in Egypt”, says Michele Dunne, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “It’s not a really high level of engagement, but at least these issues are starting to reemerge in the US-Egypt relationship”.

Ms. Dunne says she does not expect the US to exert serious pressure, such as using aid as leverage to exert pressure for reform. But Biden’s soft public chastisement of Egypt could be evidence that President Obama’s administration is responding to widespread disappointment that it has largely ignored human rights and democracy promotion, favoring instead stability and progress on Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. That criticism was on display here this week, as a consortium of Egyptian civil society groups released a report detailing violations of the 119 UNHRC recommendations Egypt had already agreed to. They expressed frustration that the West – particularly the US, which for years has sent more foreign aid to Egypt than any country except Israel – seems loath to apply external pressure on Egypt to improve its human rights record. Egypt rejected outright 21 of the Council’s 165 recommendations.

“I think the current American administration doesn’t care about the human rights issue and about religious freedom in Egypt”, says Emad Gad, an analyst with the government-financed Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. He says Egypt is adept at pledging reform in arenas such as the Human Rights Council only to then ignore the implementation on the ground. “This is one of the problems with the Universal Periodic Review” of the Human Rights Council, agrees Moataz El Fegiery, executive director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, one of the organizations that released the report. “Usually governments like Egypt which do not have the political will to improve human rights situations on the ground, they pay no cost”.

Egypt last month extended its state of emergency by two years, after promising in February to replace the emergency law with antiterrorism legislation. The emergency law allows indefinite detention without charge, and has often been used against activists and journalists rather than the terrorists and drug traffickers the government says it is intended for. According to the report released by the Egyptian NGOs, Egypt has continued to detain activists and bloggers, and torture by police and security forces has continued unabated. Egypt on Friday rejected three recommendations asking it to adopt international conventions against torture.

Significantly, the statement of the US delegate to the Human Rights Council expressed concern about the imprisonment of bloggers, as well as reports of fraud and interference with access to polling stations during elections last week for Egypt’s upper house of parliament. The delegate, John Mariz, praised some of Egypt’s efforts at reforms while expressing concern with other areas, including the killing of migrants on Egypt’s border and the renewal of the emergency law. The US, he said, also “regrets Egypt’s decision not to support a significant number of recommendations with respect to religion and political liberty”.

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STOP THE 9/11 MOSQUE PROTEST

Date: June 6th – Time: 12 Noon – Place: Ground Zero

Below is the first press announcement. The planned mosque at the hallowed Ground Zero site has clandestine funding sources. Its imam, Faisal Abdul Rauf is a radical Islamic wolf in sheep’s clothing, a seductive practitioner of taqiyya (dissimulation for the purpose of furthering the interest of the Faith) who blames America for the terrorist attacks on 911. Shortly after 9/11 he said in a CNN interview: “US policies were an accessory to the crime that happened.” Elsewhere he said: “The US and the West must acknowledge the harm they have done to Muslims before terrorism can end.” This monstrosity has to stop! The rally is already drawing 100’s from NY and out of state. If you or your organization wish to be included in the supporters/sponsors list, please let Pamela know at the number below, before it is sent to the media. Let’s Roll!

SIOA Rally Calls For Halt to Plans for Ground Zero Mosque: The human rights group Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) is hosting a rally at Ground Zero to protest the construction of a mosque at the site of the Islamic terror attack that brought down the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. Victims of 9/11 – those who lost family or friends, or who were injured on that day – are especially invited to attend. The SIOA No 9/11 Mosque Rally will be at Ground Zero on June 6 at 12 noon. Supporting groups (partial list): ACT for America, Manhattan; Z Street; Freedom Defense Initiative; Faith Freedom International, Stuart Kaufman, VAST, No Mosque at Ground Zero. The rally was scheduled after the Community Board for New York City’s financial district unanimously approved the construction of a 13-story mosque and Islamic cultural center right across from Ground Zero.

SIOA executive director Pamela Geller commented: “What could be more insulting and humiliating than a monster mosque in the shadow of the World Trade Center buildings that were brought down by an Islamic jihad attack? Any decent American, Muslim or otherwise, wouldn’t dream of such an insult. It’s a stab in eye of America”. “We chose June 6 as the rally date,” Geller explained, “because it’s D-Day. In 1944, Americans acted against the evil of Nazism. Now it is time for Americans to stand up against the evil of Islamic jihad terrorism and Islamic supremacism”. Speakers at the No 9/11 Mosque will include Nonie Darwish, ex-Muslim and author of Now They Call Me Infidel; Simon Deng, the Sudanese ex-slave and campaigner for human rights for Sudanese Christians; James Lafferty of the Virginia Anti-Shariah Task Force; and Anders Gravers of Stop Islamisation of Europe (SIOE). Hosting the event are Geller, the popular blogger and columnist who publishes the acclaimed AtlasShrugs.com blog, and SIOA associate director Robert Spencer, the bestselling author and director of JihadWatch.org. Geller is the author (with Spencer) of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America (Foreword by Ambassador John Bolton), coming July 27 from Simon & Schuster. Rally speakers and participants will stand with those lost loved ones on 9/11, and call for an end to plans for this mosque that insults the memory of those who died on that day. SIOA is one of America’s foremost organizations defending human rights, religious liberty, and the freedom of speech against Islamic supremacist intimidation and attempts to bring elements of Sharia to the United States. June 6th … BE THERE! Stop the 9/11 Mosque!

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House Members Press White House
to Confront Egypt on Forced Marriages

Bipartisan group of lawmakers tells State Department to act on the “grim reality” faced by Coptic Christian women in Egypt. Seventeen members of Congress are pressing the State Department to act on the “grim reality” faced by Coptic Christian women in Egypt, who frequently are coerced into violent forced marriages that leave them victim to rape and captive slavery. The bipartisan group of lawmakers wrote on April 16 to Ambassador-at-Large Luis Cde Baca, who heads up American efforts to thwart human trafficking around the globe.

In their letter, they exhort the State Department to confront the “criminal phenomenon” of forced marriage they say is on the rise in Egypt, where the 7 million Coptic Christians often face criminal prosecution and civic violence for their rejection of Islam. “I think it is about as bad as it can be” for Copts and other religious minorities in Egypt, said Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., who penned the letter. “It is very tough to be a Coptic Christian”. He official communication to the State Department outlined just what women face when forced into marriages with Muslim men: “physical and sexual violence, captivity … exploitation in forced domestic servitude or commercial sexual exploitation, and financial benefit to the individuals who secure the forced conversion of the victim”. Wolf and the other lawmakers say this bears all the hallmarks of human trafficking and want the State Department to include reports of the abductions in their next Trafficking in Persons report, which is due in June. “Keep in mind that we have given Egypt about $53 billion since Camp David” – the 1978 peace accords between Israel and Egypt that were arranged by the U.S. government – “so we’re actually funding them,” Wolf said. The State Department’s 2009 report on trafficking singled out Egypt for its Level II Watchlist, noting that the government made only “minimal efforts to prevent trafficking in persons” last year. But while it notes the plight of Sudanese women and others in bondage in Egypt, it does not mention Copts once – nor does the report mention Christians anywhere in its 324 pages.

A State Department spokesman said that violations of religious rights are covered in the annual reports of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. But the most recent report from the commission made no mention of forced marriages or forced conversions targeting Copts in Egypt. The eight-page section of their report covering Egypt conveys the bleak conditions Coptic Christians face, noting that “the government has not taken sufficient steps to halt the repression of … indigenous Coptic Orthodox Christians, or, in many cases, to punish those responsible for violence or other severe violations of religious freedom”. Human rights groups have outlined at least 25 known cases of abductions and forced marriages, though Wolf speculated that there may be many more unknown cases throughout the country. “If it’s one, it’s too many”, he told FoxNews.com.

Representatives from the Egyptian Embassy in Washington did not respond to questions about whether their government considers forced conversions a problem or what it intends to do halt human trafficking within its borders. The State Department said Wednesday that a response to the lawmakers’ letter was being crafted, but offered no word on whether the abduction of Copts would be included in the forthcoming report for 2010. Wolf, however, does not expect to see much action from the State Department, which he criticized for failing to fill key human rights positions including the ambassador at large for religious freedom – a position mandated by law. “I expect the State Department to do nothing,” he said, “because that’s the way the State Department has been responding”. Wolf was joined by 16 other members of the House in signing the letter, including: Reps. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., Chris Smith, R-N.J., Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., Donald Payne, D-N.J., Dan Burton, R-Ind., Rep. Albio Sires, D-N.J., Trent Franks, R-Ariz., Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., Joseph Cao, R-La., Aaron Schock, R-Ill., Bob Inglis, R-S.C., Michele Bachman, R-Minn., Joe Wilson, R-S.C., Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., and Ted Poe, R-Tex. The delegate from Washington, D.C., Eleanor Holmes-Norton, also signed the note.

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Egyptian Christian Framed in Sexual Assault Case

(AINA) — As Guirgis Baroumi went out to Farshout on his tricycle selling poultry on November 18, 2009, he never imagined that he would be framed in a sexual assault crime – which would be used twice in less than 7 weeks by Islamists as a pretext for arson, looting and slaying of his Christian Coptic brethren in Farshout and Nag Hammadi.

Pessimistic observers see that the death sentence has already been passed on Baroumi when the Egyptian authorities and State Security decided to interfere in the course of justice and use him as a scapegoat to justify the violations against the Copts in Egypt. After the last court session on March 24, 2010, the defense team came out angry and critical of the court. “It is obvious there is lack of justice. The trial is an absolute comedy, an unjust theatrical play.” said Fathi Farid, Chairman of the Egyptian Organization for Anti-Discrimination (EGHR). “The developments in the case are not reassuring at all.” Their grievances against the court include changing its mind with every session, preventing them from meeting with the defendant, barring them from closed sessions, following the wrong procedures with regards to forensic evidence, and accepting new witnesses.

Claims of the alleged sexual assault of 12-year-old Muslim girl Youssra Abdelwahab by 21-year-old Copt Guirgis Baroumi, on November 18, 2009, led to several days of violence by hundreds of Muslim protesters who went to the police station to kill Baroumi, then went on a rampage of looting and torching Christian-owned property. State Security also forced the eviction of 160 Christians from Baroumi’s village (AINA 11-22-2009, 11-23-2009). Baroumi, who always denied committing the crime, was not subjected to forensics, “which gave the impression that he was framed to be used as a pretext for assaulting Copts in Farshout and the neighboring villages and destroying them economically,” said Coptic activist Wagih Yacoub.
On January 6, 2010, when Copts celebrate Christmas Eve, six Copts were gunned down in a drive-by shooting as they emerged from church in Nag Hammadi. (AINA 1-7-2010). This hideous crime resulted in widespread Coptic demonstrations worldwide and international condemnation, with the USA saying that the killings of Copts showed “an atmosphere of intolerance in Egypt”.

Egyptian officials, including the Interior Minister, the Prosecutor General and the Speaker of the People’s Assembly, Dr. Fathi Sourour, have denied a sectarian element to the Nag Hammadi slaying, insisting it was a criminal act, in revenge for the rape of the Muslim girl by a Copt in Farshout. Although the two cases are unconnected, the government linked them together, even the timings of the court sessions run parallel in both cases. Egyptian rights groups have disputed the government theory and criticized authorities for refusing to acknowledge the sectarian aspect of the killings. “If they can prove that Guirgis is guilty then they can say that what happened on Christmas Eve is a reaction to what he did,” said Fathi Farid. In an interview with BBC Arabic on January 31, 2010, Sourour said the Nag Hammadi Christmas Eve shooting of Christians was a single criminal act, with no sectarian dimensions, prompted by the “death” of a Muslim girl as a result of being raped by a Copt (AINA 2-3-2010). When he was criticized for falsifying facts as she was still alive, he altered his statement, saying the girl “died morally.” Defense team member Al-Zohairy told Watani Coptic Weekly, “This statement, coming from the Parliament Speaker and professor of criminal law, is a serious matter, because this is an indictment of Baroumi before the end of the trial, and a violation of the rule which says that the accused is innocent until proven guilty”.

Baroumi’s defense team has expressed fear over the way the trial is being handled in an effort to bring a water-tight case against Baroumi. “The case against him is full of holes,” said Ahraf Edward, defense team member. “Surprisingly, documentation show that prosecution referred the case to court only two days after the arrest has been made and without waiting for any forensic reports to verify that Baroumi was the one who committed the alleged sexual assault,” said Edward who was one of the first to take up Baroumi’s defense after the Bar Association in Qena, issued a statement warning lawyers not to take up Baroumi’s defense, in solidarity with the girl’s family. Many people believe the Farshout girl’s story lacks credibility. “The girl changed her story nine times, as to what happened, the time and the location,” said Ashraf Edward.

According to the first description of the crime as per the police report issued on 18 November 2009, (scan of police report, the father of the girl reported that his daughter Youssra Abdelwahab told him when she came home that a man on a tricycle threw her on the ground and “tried to sleep with her”. The report continues that she gave her father his description who ran to Farshout and caught him at the railway crossing. The father said that he came to know that his name was Guirgis Baroumi, his daughter identified him, and they accompanied him to the police station. “Her story changed when she was questioned by prosecution into rape on the busy main road, but that he had no time to complete the act because she called out for help” said Dr. Ihab Ramzy, “The place, the circumstances and in view of no prior relationship between them, makes the rape incident extremely illogical and full of lies”.

Youssra’s lawyers told ElYoum 7 newspaper that they are now calling for a change in the description of the charge against Baroumi to make it abduction and rape, which carries the death penalty. “Because he obstructed her way, made her fall off her donkey and him being so huge that he pinned her down to the ground which amount to abduction.” one of the lawyers said. The fourth trial session which was held in Qena Criminal Court on March 24, was marred by a clash between the defense team and the presiding judge, Mahmoud Abdelsalam, who barred them from attending sessions until they obtain a power of attorney from the defendant or either of his parents. “This is not legal at all. A power of attorney should not be requested at a criminal court if the defendant is present, it is only required if he is absent,” Ramzy said. He pointed out that the procedures to obtain a power of attorney is complex and the judge knows that, “He just wants to limit the defense of the defendant,” Dr. Ihab Ramzy said. Attorneys have been complaining that they are never allowed to meet with Baroumi in prison on State Security orders.

Defense attorney Saeed Abdelmassih said that the judge prevented the defense team from attending a closed session on February 17 when the alleged rape victim, her parents and a new witness were being questioned. “This is against all norms of justice to separate an accused person from his attorney.” When they were barred, defense complained to the Justice Minister and Attorney General and it was agreed with the judge after that, that they would question the victim on March 24, however, the girl and her family did not show up at court. Outspoken attorney Ms.Howaida Al-Omda said “the court is preventing defense from questioning the alleged rape victim because she is a liar. I do not believe that the rape incident took place at all”. The court also accepted as a witness 16-year-old student Mohamed Hussein, who claims to have seen the incident in November. The defense team objected to this, but the court overruled their objection. “Legally, the defense of the defendant has the right to bring witnesses while the victim is restricted to the list of witnesses mentioned in the case file,” defense lawyer Peter Al-Naggar told Copts-United. “the victim and her father said in the police and investigations that there were no witnesses to the incident. So after all that time a witness appears and the court allows it,” said Fathi Farid. All NGOs and journalists carrying foreign press identity cards were barred from the court session.

Christian youths, who believe like many others that Giruis Baroumi is innocent and that he is bound to lose his life with powerful opponents such as the Egyptian government and the State Security authorities who insist on his guilt, have initiated a Facebook campaign called Save Guirguis.

Robb . . .
That’s exactly the way the cookie crumbles – you’ve got it!
(I’m quiet certain about that and give a shit on any leftwing
insults like nazi or racist – i’m first off all a father who has to
protect his children and their future!) In other words: Who
really wants to see his Daughters as a abused Slave of a
big crowd of monkey’s? Not me!

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